THE  NEW 

OPPORTUNITY 

OF  THE 

CHURCH 


ROBERT  E.SPEER 


0^iWmci 


'=?/ 


MAY  29  imo 


BV  600 

.S6  1919 

\ 

Speer,  ] 

Robert  E. 

1867- 

1947 

The  new 

opportunity  of 

the 

church 

THE  NEW  OPPORTUNITY 
OF  THE  CHURCH 


THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

NBW  YORK  •    BOSTON  •   CHICAGO  •   DALLAS 
ATLANTA  •    SAN  FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN  &  CO.,  Limited 

LONDON  •    BOMBAY  •    CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE  MACMILLAN  CO.  OF  CANADA,  Ltd. 

TORONTO 


The  New  Opportunity  of 


the  Church 


MAY  29  1919 
■%OS/CAL  StWl#' 


BY 


ROBERT  E.  SPEER 


Beta  gorb 

THE  MACMILLAN  COMPANY 

1919 


AXL  rights  reserved 


Copyright,  1919 
By  the  M^VCMILLAN  COMPANY 


Set  up  and  electxotyped.     Published,  March,  1919 


PREFACE 

This  little  book  is  not  an  attempt  to  prescribe  any  pro- 
gram or  method  of  reconstruction  or  to  define  in  any 
comprehensive  way  the  present  tasks  of  the  Christian 
Church.  A  good  deal  more  is  called  for  to-day  than  this 
little  volume  at  all  considers.  Good  will  and  earnest 
purpose  are  not  enough.  There  must  be  also  careful 
and  competent  thinking  out  of  the  economic  and  social 
problems  involved  in  the  next  forward  steps  in  human 
progress.  But  good  will  and  earnest  purpose  must  be 
back  of  all  such  thinking  and  it  is  for  good  will  and 
earnest  purpose  that  this  little  book  appeals.  In  the 
midst  of  much  hesitation  and  questioning  it  is  a  simple 
word  of  summons  and  reassurance,  in  the  faith  of  the 
motto  written  over  the  door  of  the  old  hotel  in  Duala, 
in  Kamerun,  **  The  old  falls.  The  times  will  change. 
And  new  life  will  blossom  from  the  ruins." 


CONTENTS 

CHAPTER  PAGE 

I     Some  Dangers  and  Duties  of  the  Present 

Hour i 

II    The  Present  Business  of  the  Church    .     17 

III  The  Effect  of  the  War  on  Christian 

Convictions  and  Ideals 32 

IV  The   Duty  of  a   Larger   Christian   Co- 

operation        63 

V    The  War  Aims  and  Foreign  Missions  .     .     89 


THE  NEW  OPPORTUNITY  OF 
THE  CHURCH 


SOME   DANGERS   AND  DUTIES  OF  THE   PRESENT   HOUR 

There  is  a  military  maxim  in  the  First  Book  of  Kings 
which  we  know  from  our  own  experience  to  be  wise  and 
just.  "  Let  not  him  that  girdeth  on  his  armor  boast 
himself  as  he  that  putteth  it  off."  The  hour  when  a  man 
or  a  nation  is  about  to  engage  in  a  great  struggle  is  no 
time  for  relaxation  and  ease.  There  are  three  sure  perils 
which  confront  men  then,  the  peril  of  over  confidence, 
the  peril  of  underestimating  the  foe,  and  the  peril  of  a  lack 
of  unity,  foresight  and  vigilance  and  of  willingness  to  pay 
all  necessary  costs.  In  the  face  of  perils  like  these  there 
is  no  room  for  self  contentment  or  praise.  Let  these  wait 
until  the  victory  has  been  won.  "  Let  not  him  that 
girdeth  on  his  armor  boast  himself  as  he  that  putteth  it 
off." 

But  we  have  discovered  that  the  converse  of  this  warn- 
ing is  equally  true.  *'  Let  not  him  that  putteth  off  his 
armor  boast  himself  as  he  that  girdeth  it  on."  The 
same  perils  that  meet  men  and  nations  at  the  beginning 
of  a  war  meet  them  at  the  end.  There  is  the  peril  of 
over  confidence.     There  is  the  peril  of  underestimating 

I 


2        The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

the  task.  There  is  the  peril  of  a  lack  of  unity,  vigilance 
and  prevision  and  of  willingness  to  pay  the  price  of  peace. 
And  men  may  succumb  to  these  perils  at  the  end  vrho 
overcame  them  at  the  beginning.  Again  and  again  men 
and  nations  have  lost  after  the  struggle  the  very  things 
w^hich  they  entered  and  endured  the  struggle  to  achieve. 
"  The  morrow  of  victory,"  Mazzini  said,  **  is  more  peril- 
ous than  its  eve."  We  begin  to  perceive  this  to-day. 
"  Gentlemen,"  said  Clemenceau  a  few  days  after  the 
armistice  was  signed  to  a  group  of  French  senators  who 
had  waylaid  him  with  congratulations,  *'  our  difficult  time 
is  just  approaching.  It  is  harder  to  win  peace  than  to 
win  war."  We  are  realizing  now  that  this  is  true  and 
that  if  we  are  negligent  we  may  lose  in  the  hour  of  vic- 
tory some  of  the  very  things  which  the  victory  was  won 
to  achieve. 

We  see  the  dangers  of  these  after-struggle  times  again 
and  again  in  those  authentic  pictures  of  life  of  which  the 
Bible  as  a  transcript  of  life  is  full.  A  useful  Christian 
minister  in  a  recent  sermon  called  attention  to  the  vivid 
touch  in  Noah's  history.  The  flood  had  washed  the 
world  clean.  Old  institutions,  old  lusts,  old  vices,  old 
wrongs  had  been  wiped  out.  Men  had  a  chance  to  begin 
afresh  and  to  build  a  new  world.  And  where  was  the 
man  to  whom  the  duty  and  the  glory  of  the  reconstruc- 
tion came?  Drunk  and  morally  shameless  in  his  tent. 
We  come  upon  the  same  failure  in  Elijah.  He  had  met 
the  organized  superstition  and  corruption  of  the  nation 
in  one  dramatic  encounter  and  had  defeated  it.  The 
ground  was  cleared  for  a  new  order  and  instead  of  girding 
himself  to  his  uncompleted  task  and  establishing  the  foun- 
dations of  righteousness,  the  old  warrior  who  had  not 


Dangers  and  Duties  3 

been  afraid  of  the  massed  forces  of  fraud  and  wrong  but 
single  handed  had  overthrown  them,  is  cowed  by  the 
threat  of  a  bad  woman  and  goes  off  alone,  abandoning  his 
work,  to  sit  down  under  a  bush  in  the  wilderness  and 
comfort  himself  with  the  thought  of  his  spiritual  isolation. 
Even  so  we  face  our  dangers  to-day,  not  less  real  or 
subtle  or  perilous  than  the  dangers  of  the  war.  There 
is  the  danger  of  moral  relaxation.  Four  days  after  the 
armistice  was  signed  this  warning  was  sent  out  from 
Washington : 

"  Cessation  of  hostilities  in  Europe  and  disappearance  of 
the  prospect  of  meeting  the  enemy  on  the  battlefield  has  brought 
an  immediate  loss  of  morale  among  American  troops  at  home 
that  is  regarded  at  the  War  Department  as  somewhat  alarm- 
ing. It  is  understood  that  steps  to  deal  with  the  situation 
already  are  being  prepared. 

"Reports  from  all  divisions  on  Nov.  ii,  the  date  of  the 
armistice,  without  exception  contained  glowing  references  to 
the  high  spirit  of  the  men  and  to  their  evident  desire  for  early 
embarkation.  Upon  news  that  the  armistice  had  been  signed, 
the  mental  attitude  of  the  individual  soldier  is  said  to  have 
undergone  a  marked  change.  Instead  of  bombarding  his  imme- 
diate superiors  with  queries  as  to  the  probable  date  of  en- 
training for  the  seaboard,  he  became  anxious  as  to  the  date 
of  his  release  from  service.  More  serious  are  reports  by 
some  commanding  officers  that  their  men  are  exhibiting  a 
tendency  to  view  themselves  as  already  released  from  the 
strict  routine  of  the  camps." 

In  some  camps  the  tidings  of  the  armistice  led  to  such 
disorder  as  men  would  have  been  severely  punished  for 
a  fortnight  before,  but  the  outbreak  was  so  general  that 
nothing  could  be  done.  In  New  York  City  on  the  night 
of  the  celebration  over  the  premature  peace  tidings  more 
soldiers  and  sailors  in  uniform,  it  is  said,  were  seen  drunk 
on  the  streets  than  had  been  seen  before  in  all  the  time 


4        The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

since  the  war  began.  In  the  trenches  the  change  which 
took  place  was  revolutionary.  Men  had  been  on  the 
keen  edge  of  moral  duty,  strung  to  the  highest  tension 
of  loyalty.  They  had  cast  up  accounts  and  waited  upon 
death.  God  seemed  so  near  in  that  hour  of  deepest  need 
and  intensest  life  as  almost  to  be  within  touch.  Then 
in  a  moment  this  flamed  up  and  passed.  The  common- 
ness of  uninspired  life  returned.  We  feel  this  moral 
relaxation  in  ourselves  and  throughout  the  nation.  Some- 
thing that  was  here  is  gone.  Much  of  it,  to  be  sure, 
had  to  go.  We  are  better  off  with  what  self-discipline 
we  can  secure,  than  with  state  discipline  under  permanent 
military  control. 

We  have  not  only  undergone  a  relaxation  of  moral 
tone.  We  are  witnessing  sadly  a  dissolution  of  our  unity. 
The  war  bound  us  together  in  a  new  tightness  of  national 
will  and  spirit.  There  are  three  things  which  unite  men : 
a  common  love,  a  common  task  and  a  common  danger. 
And  the  common  danger  seems  to  be  necessary  to  focus 
the  common  love  and  to  impose  the  common  task.  The 
common  love  is  still  here.  It  is  pitiful  that  we  do  not 
still  recognize  the  reality  and  urgency  of  the  common 
task,  as  great  now  as  the  task  in  the  war  and  more  diffi- 
cult. But  the  common  danger  is  past.  And  our  unity 
is  dissolved.  It  is  a  good  thing  to  have  the  imprisoning 
shackles  removed  from  our  wonted  American  liberties, 
but  it  is  tragic  to  see  the  schisms  and  partisanships  re- 
opening and  the  forces  divided  in  antagonism  which 
should  be  united  in  common  undertakings  and  against 
the  common  foes  of  the  national  character.  And  it  is 
with  a  sad  dismay  that  we  see  suspicion  displanting  our 
international  confidence  and  trust. 


Dangers  and  Duties  5 

There  is  also  a  surrender  of  idealism.  With  some  it 
is  not  a  surrender.  It  is  only  the  open  disavowal  of 
sentiments  which  they  never  shared  but  which  the  tide 
of  the  national  spirit  compelled  them  to  respect  while 
the  war  was  going  on.  Some  indeed  ventured  to  deride 
the  Quixotic  idealism  which  prevailed  but  they  paid  it 
the  respect  of  making  their  derision  anonymous,  like 
"the  American  Jurist  "  in  his  articles  in  the  New  York 
Times  which  so  pleased  the  Germans  because  they  were 
the  frank  application  to  American  politics  of  the  German 
notion  of  the  superiority  of  the  State  to  any  obligation 
except  that  of  its  own  material  interest.  Now,  however, 
men  who  rejected  the  idealism  which  awakened  the 
nation  and  sustained  its  soul  in  the  war  do  not  hesitate 
openly  to  repudiate  the  very  ends  for  which  we  fought. 
They  propose  that  we  should  now  belie  our  professions 
and  betray  the  good  faith  of  the  nation  toward  the  dead 
who  died  not  for  national  interest  but  for  principle  and 
for  humanity  and  for  a  new  world. 

As  against  these  dangers,  and  the  other  dangers  than 
these  which  peace  has  brought,  we  need  two  things.  We 
need  first  the  loyalty  and  patriotism  of  peace,  a  more 
difficult  even  though  less  glorious  thing  than  the  patriot- 
ism and  loyalty  of  war,  by  as  much  as  it  is  harder  to  live 
for  a  cause  than  to  die  for  it.  It  was  for  such  loyalty 
and  patriotism  that  Lincoln  appealed  in  his  Gettysburg 
speech:  "  It  is  for  us  the  living  to  be  dedicated  here  to 
the  unfinished  work  which  they  who  fought  here  have 
thus  far  so  nobly  advanced.  It  is  for  us  to  be  here 
dedicated  to  the  great  task  remaining  before  us  —  that 
from  these  honored  dead  we  take  increased  devotion 
to  that  cause  for  which  they  gave  the  last  full  measure 


6        The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

of  devotion."  War  did  its  part.  Is  peace  now  to  fail 
and  be  faithless  where  war  was  faithful?  There  is  need 
still  of  the  same  loyalty  and  love  of  country  which  was 
given  in  war  and  which  the  nation  needs  not  less  in 
peace.  And,  secondly,  we  need  the  desire  or  purpose  of 
a  new  world.  Mr.  Lloyd  George  expressed  the  need 
in  an  exhortation  to  a  labor  deputation  in  the  midst  of 
the  war:  "Don't  always  be  thinking  of  getting  back 
where  you  were  before  the  war.  Get  a  really  new  world. 
I  firmly  believe  that  what  is  known  as  the  after-the-war 
settlement  will  direct  the  destinies  of  all  classes  for  gen- 
erations to  come.  I  believe  the  settlement  after  the  war 
will  succeed  in  proportion  to  its  audacity.  The  readier 
we  are  to  cut  away  from  the  past  the  better  we  are  likely 
to  succeed.  Think  out  new  ways,  new  methods,  of  deal- 
ing with  old  problems.  I  hope  no  class  will  be  harking 
back  to  the  pre-war  conditions.  If  every  class  insists 
upon  doing  that  then  God  help  this  country.  Get  a  new 
world."  **  The  triumphant  close  of  the  great  war,"  says 
Secretary  of  State  Lansing,  "  does  not  solve  all  the  prob- 
lems. Society  has  been  shattered  in  many  places.  We 
must  rebuild  it  on  a  better  foundation.  Materialism 
was  largely  responsible  for  this  war.  We  must  not  sink 
back  again  to  the  same  level.  A  strong  and  vital  spirit- 
uality ought  to  dominate  mankind,  so  that  we  may  rise 
above  the  greed  and  selfishness  which  have  corrupted 
mankind  and  distorted  the  ideals  and  purposes  of  life." 
The  war  grew  out  of  the  past  but  it  was  not  fought  for 
the  past,  it  was  fought  for  the  future,  to  clear  the  way 
for  a  different  and  better  world. 

Whether  we  shall  have  a  better  world  or  not  depends 
upon  how  we  meet  now  the  dangers  and  duties  of  peace 


Dangers  and  Duties  7 

and  whether  we  do  as  effectively  the  work  of  winning 
this  better  world  as  we  did  the  work  of  winning  the  war. 
And  for  what  was  the  war  won  if  it  was  not  for  the  sake 
of  a  better  world?  What  does  anybody  want  with  a 
war  ?  Why  should  anybody  want  to  win  it  ?  What  will 
he  do  with  it?  He  wins  it  to  be  done  with  it.  What 
he  wants  when  he  has  won  it  is  to  lose  it.  The  thing 
to  be  kept  is  the  thing  which  the  war  stood  in  the  way 
of  and  had  to  be  fought  through  to  make  possible  —  the 
new  world  behind  and  beyond  it. 

And  our  present  practical  question  now  is  what 
Christian  men  and  women  and  the  Christian  Church  can 
do  to  win  a  better  world  out  of  the  war. 

We  can  believe  a  better  world  to  be  possible.  All 
about  us  now  are  the  practical  men  who  ridicule  the  idea 
that  war  can  be  destroyed,  militarists,  munition  makers, 
political  and  commercial  imperialists,  and  theologians  who 
think  that  to  try  to  get  rid  of  war  and  pestilence  is  to 
vitiate  the  authority  of  the  Bible,  and  a  host  of  others 
who  think  and  say  that  the  world  we  had  before  the  war 
is  the  only  kind  of  world  we  shall  have  after  it.  The 
war  did  nothing,  they  say,  and  some  of  them  say  it  was 
intended  to  do  nothing,  but  defeat  Germany.  Now  that 
that  end  has  been  achieved  other  things  will  continue  as 
they  were.  By  the  blood  of  the  eight  million  men  who 
died  to  make  a  better  world  possible  they  shall  do  noth- 
ing of  the  kind.  It  is  quite  true  that  the  war  did  not 
introduce  the  millennium.  There  were  some  people  who 
held  that  the  millennium  had  begun  in  the  Nineteenth 
Century.  But  they  were  mistaken.  It  had  not  begun 
then  and  it  has  not  begun  now.  But  our  effort  to  make 
the  world  better  does  not  have  to  await  the  coming  of 


8        The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

the  millennium  before  It  can  hope  to  accomplish  anything. 
Christendom  has  got  rid  of  legahzed  polygamy  and  slav- 
ery. It  is  doing  away  with  the  saloon  and  the  brothel. 
The  time  has  come  when  it  can  get  rid  of  war.  If  we 
do  not  it  will  be  our  own  fault.  If  we  don't  want  to 
be  rid  of  war  it  will  stay.  If  we  prepare  for  it  we  shall 
have  it.  But  if  we  want  to  be  done  with  it  we  can  be. 
If  we  prepare  for  peace  it  will  be  peace  we  shall  have. 
The  way  to  get  a  world  where  it  prevails,  a  world  of 
righteousness  and  truth  and  progress  is  to  believe  in  such 
a  world  as  a  possibility,  to  cherish  large  and  generous 
thoughts  of  what  can  be  by  man's  good  v/IU  and  the  grace 
of  God.  And  as  Lloyd  George  says  there  is  no  reason 
why  we  should  not  be  bold  about  it.  We  can  do  now 
just  what  we  want  done  and  will  pay  the  price  for  and 
are  willing  to  let  God  do  through  us.  There  are  laws 
of  human  progress  and  of  social  change,  no  doubt,  but  the 
laws  that  shall  operate  now  will  be  laws  of  relapse  and 
of  Immobility  or  they  will  be  laws  of  progress,  as  we 
shall  decide.  We  may  indeed  drop  back  Into  the  old 
world  and  carry  its  principles  of  suspicion,  rivalry,  self- 
interest,  on  into  the  future,  or  we  can  believe  in  the 
possibility  of  something  better.  Why  not  now?  We 
have  discarded  the  authority  of  the  old  limitations  in 
nature.     As  the  Panama  Canal  diggers'  song  declares : 

"  Got  any  rivers  they  say  are  uncrossable? 

Got  any  mountains  you  can't  tunnel  through? 
We  specialize  on  the  wholly  impossible 

Doing  the  thing  that  no  man  can  do." 

Why  not  discard  the  authority  of  the  old  limitations  in 
moral   and   social   achievement?     Samuel   C.   Armstrong 


Dangers  and  Duties  9 

discarded  them  after  the  Civil  War  and  began  a  new 
era  of  racial  education.  We  may  begin  a  new  era  of 
racial  and  national  relationship  if  we  will.  The  limita- 
tions and  hindrances  are  not  in  God  or  in  nature  but  in  us. 
We  can  help  to  win  a  new  world  by  seeing  clearly  the 
evils  which  are  to  be  overthrown  and  the  enemies  who 
still  remain  to  be  vanquished.  The  war  has  for  a  season 
vividly  revealed  these.  War  inflames.  It  also  illumines. 
The  inflammations  are  dying  down.  Let  us  hope  that  the 
illuminations  may  not  fade.  They  showed  us  what  iniq- 
uity is  and  what  also  is  its  sure  fruitage.  Incarnated 
in  German  militarism  and  its  principles  and  methods 
of  war  we  saw  just  how  hideous  and  deadly  certain 
ideas  and  moral  qualities  really  are.  And  well  nigh  the 
whole  world  rose  up  in  horror  and  self-defense  against 
what  we  saw.  But  now  that  German  militarism  has 
been  defeated  and  the  war  won  we  need  to  beware  of  los- 
ing the  horror  and  the  sense  of  the  need  of  protection 
against  these  same  ideas  and  iniquities.  If  they  were 
wrong  in  Germany  in  the  war  they  are  not  less  wrong 
anywhere  else  in  peace.  They  are  wrong  if  they  exist  in 
us,  and  they  will  as  surely  bring  punishment  upon  us  as 
they  brought  it  on  Germany.  Furthermore  the  war 
demonstrated  to  the  nation  that  certain  social  evils  are 
fatal  to  the  creation  and  maintenance  of  an  army  and 
that  these  evils  are  not  invincible.  Drink  and  lust  were 
seen  to  be  deadly  enemies  of  efficiency  in  war  and  the 
nation  shut  them  off  from  the  army.  Always  before, 
men  said  that  this  could  not  be  done,  that  soldiers  must 
be  fed  on  drink  and  lust.  Now  we  know  that  it  is  not 
true.  But  if  drink  and  lust  are  bad  for  soldiers  why 
are  they  not  bad  for  civilians  too?     If  the  nation  can 


10     The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

not  afford  to  tolerate  them  in  time  of  war  how  can  it 
afford  to  tolerate  them  in  time  of  peace?  The  same 
ideal  of  effective  service  needed  in  war  is  needed  now 
in  the  civil  and  industrial  life  of  the  nation.  As  General 
Pershing  said  in  a  message  to  the  home  churches  through 
the  Federal  Council:  "We  expect  not  only  to  vindicate 
the  cause  of  justice  and  honor  and  righteousness  but 
also  to  lay  a  solid  foundation  for  world  peace.  We  dare 
not  claim  that,  as  an  Army,  we  have  yet  achieved  that 
high  standard  of  manhood  and  conduct  upon  which  the 
largest  human  effectiveness  should  be  built,  but  the  ideal 
of  the  Nation  and  of  the  churches  is  constantly  before 
us.  With  sincerity  and  firm  purpose  we  set  our  faces 
toward  the  goal.  After  all,  it  is  a  common  fight  —  yours 
there  and  ours  here.  What  is  necessary  for  the  manhood 
of  the  soldier  is  necessary  for  the  manhood  of  the  citizen." 
By  seeing  this  and  insisting  now  upon  the  continuing 
and  universal  validity  of  the  moral  ideals  essential  to 
the  life  of  the  nation  in  peace  as  well  as  in  war,  we  can 
help  on  a  different  order.  It  is  quite  true  that  men 
cannot  be  made  moral  by  law,  but  immorality  can  be 
made  difficult  and  help  can  be  given  to  that  which  is  not 
bad,  but  only  weak. 

We  can  help  by  supporting  the  men,  the  measures 
and  the  movements  which  are  directed  to  bringing  in 
new  times.  We  can  begin  this  in  our  own  community. 
Each  community  is  a  microcosm  of  the  nation.  It  is 
the  nation  in  miniature.  In  our  own  community  we  can 
support  the  men  and  the  movements  that  look  forward 
and  not  back.  We  can  ask  regarding  each  local  measure. 
Would  this,  magnified  to  the  scale  of  the  nation  help  or 
hinder?     Would  it  sustain  the  new  time?     This  demand 


Dangers  and  Duties  II 

for  different  ways  does  not  cover  everything.  The  fund 
of  our  solid  moral  and  economic  achievement  is  not  to  be 
destroyed.  Progress  is  not  the  dissolution  of  organiza- 
tion. It  is  its  development.  The  human  society  which 
represents  the  highest  amount  of  mutual  interdependence, 
while  most  difficult,  will  in  the  end  be  the  happiest.  St. 
Paul's  ideal  of  humanity  is  a  human  body,  the  most 
intricate  organization  which  we  know.  Names  ought 
not  to  terrify  us,  nor  the  inequality  of  men  in  other  days 
to  meet  the  demands  which  some  day  men  must  meet 
if  the  will  of  God  is  to  be  done  on  the  earth.  The 
men  who  discredit  unselfishness,  who  hold  by  mercantile 
principles  alone,  who  disbelieve  in  any  but  the  old  world, 
although  the  old  world  itself  was  new  in  its  time,  and 
has  only  now  worn  out,  who  are  willing  to  lead  us  no- 
where but  backward  must  understand  that  the  faces  of 
those  who  once  followed  are  turned  in  the  other  direction 
and  that  they  intend  to  move  forward. 

And  a  new  order  is  to  be  won,  not  by  change  only 
but  also  by  a  steadfast  immovableness.  There  must  be 
men  and  women  who  will  stand  fast  for  absolute  moral 
principles  without  yielding  or  compromise.  It  goes  with- 
out saying  that  there  will  be  need  of  compromise  as  to 
method  and  process.  Compromise  in  these  things  is  only 
another  name  for  patience.  But  when  it  comes  to  prin- 
ciple, progress  is  made  not  by  abatement  or  surrender 
but  by  unbending  loyalty.  And  inferior  men  with  clear 
vision  of  right  principles  and  high  ideals  are  better  men 
for  us  than  the  clever  sophists  who  repudiate  the  theo- 
logical doctrine  of  human  depravity  and  whose  political 
philosophy  nevertheless  uses  that  doctrine  to  justify  what 
no  theology  in  which  Christian  men  have  ever  believed 


12      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

can  be  got  to  condone.  As  we  face  the  issues  of  this 
time  when  men  have  to  choose  between  courses  of  action 
decisive  in  their  result  for  many  years  to  come,  we  need 
the  creative  spirit  of  the  binding  grip  of  right  principle 
which  holds  fast  and  will  not  make  sacrifice  or  com- 
promise. We  need  the  Webster  of  January  26,  1830, 
not  the  Webster  of  March  7,  1850.  It  is  good  for  our 
weakness  and  timidity  to  turn  back  to  these  two  great 
days,  and  to  pray  that  the  God  of  truth  may  keep  us  from 
Webster's  mistake  on  that  tragic  seventh  of  March  when 
the  foundations  slipped  and  the  strong  tower  stood  fast 
no  more.  Not  now  the  flashing  lightning  and  the  rolling 
thunder  of  the  answers  to  Calhoun  and  Hayne  but  only 
a  great  mountain  sliding  in  the  rain!  And  Webster 
knew  that  the  blunder  had  been  made.  Thenceforth, 
as  Mr.  Lodge  says,  "  he  was  disturbed  and  ill  at  ease. 
He  never  admitted  it,  even  to  himself,  but  his  mind  was 
not  at  peace,  and  he  could  not  conceal  the  fact.  Pos- 
terity can  see  the  evidences  of  it  plainly  enough,  and  a 
man  of  his  intellect  and  fame  knew  that  with  posterity 
the  final  reckoning  must  be  made.  No  man  can  say  that 
Webster  anticipated  the  unfavorable  judgment  which  his 
countrymen  have  passed  upon  his  conduct,  but  that  in  his 
heart  he  feared  such  a  judgment  cannot  be  doubted. 
If  the  7th  of  March  speech  was  right,  then  all  that  had 
gone  before  was  false  and  wrong.  In  that  speech  he 
broke  from  his  past,  from  his  own  principles  and  from 
the  principles  of  New  England,  and  closed  his  splendid 
public  career  with  a  terrible  mistake."  So  far  as  the 
past  has  rested  on  wrong  principles  the  time  has  come 
for  breaking  from  it.     So  far  as  the  present  needs  new 


Dangers  and  Duties  13 

principles  the  time  has  come  for  asserting  them.  It 
should  be  done  in  the  new  peace.  As  Life  remarked 
recently,  we  want  none  of  the  old  style  diplomatic  doc- 
tors around  now  sewing  sponges  in  the  wounds  which 
they  are  closing  up,  to  fester  and  breed  new  trouble  and 
disease.  The  world  wants  a  clean  and  just  piece  of  work 
done  now  and  done  once  for  all. 

And  a  clean  and  just  piece  of  work  needs  to  be  done 
in  each  one  of  us.  We  can  best  bring  in  a  better  world 
by  being  ourselves  better  men.  As  Mr.  Balfour  remarked 
when  the  war  was  nearing  its  end,  we  want  a  new  world 
but  can  only  have  it  as  we  ourselves  get  new  hearts. 
The  limitations  of  human  nature  are  constantly  urged 
as  an  insuperable  objection  to  the  efforts  and  the  vision  of 
the  moral  idealists,  but  those  men  will  worry  least  about 
these  limitations  in  events  who  are  most  conscientiously 
seeking  to  transcend  them  in  their  own  lives.  While  the 
broad  social  forces  are  at  their  renovating  work  under  the 
hand  of  God,  our  personal  privilege  is  to  augment  them 
by  our  own  renewal  in  the  image  of  Christ,  the  one  Right 
Man  and  the  Head  of  Humanity.  His  kind  of  world, 
the  Kingdom  of  God  on  earth,  can  only  be  built  on  His 
kind  of  men.  If  I  want  a  new  world  I  must  be  the  kind 
of  a  man  I  want  the  new  world  to  be.  If  I  am  not 
willing  to  pay  this  price  what  honesty  is  there  in  my 
talk  of  a  Golden  Year?     As  Newman  challenges  us: 

"  Thou  to  wax  fierce 
In  the  cause  of  the  Lord ! 
Anger  and  zeal 
And  the  joy  of  the  brave, 
Who  bade  thee  to  feel, 
Sin's  slave?  " 


14      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

If  men  honestly  want  a  world  of  good  will  and  brother- 
hood let  them  be  the  men  St.  Paul  demands  in  his  de- 
scription in  First  Thessalonians  of  the  Christian  citizen 
—  a  man  of  purity,  honesty,  holiness,  brotherliness,  in- 
dustry, modesty,  thrift,  courage.  In  personal  life  and 
social  relationships,  in  family  and  business,  each  of  us 
has  his  chance  to  hasten  a  new  human  order,  by  intro- 
ducing here  in  the  ranges  nearest  him  the  principles  of 
a  new  time,  the  old  principles  of  Jesus,  the  Carpenter, 
the  Teacher,  the  Friend,  the  Saviour,  the  whole  great 
Personality  and  Power  whom  Isaiah  foresaw  —  we  be- 
lieve it  of  Him,  every  word  —  Wonderful,  Counselor, 
Mighty  God,  Everlasting  Father,  Prince  of  Peace. 

If  the  new  world  is  not  to  be  brought  nearer  then 
what  was  the  war  all  about? 

"  With  fire  and  sword  the  country  round 

Was    wasted    far    and    wide 
And  many  a  gentle  mother  then 

And  new  born  baby  died. 

"  They  say  it  was'  a  shocking  sight, 

After  the  field  was  won. 
For  many  thousand   bodies  here 

Lay   rotting   in   the    sun. 

"But  what   good  came  of   it   at  last? 

Quoth  little  Peterkin, 
'  Why  that  I  cannot  tell,'  said  he, 

'But  'twas   a  famous   victory.'" 

Yes,  and  the  victory  had  to  be  won  at  any  cost  to  end 
what  refused  to  die  till  it  was  slain.  But  the  men  who 
gave  their  lives  to  this  end  had  more  than  this  end  in 
view.     They  were  dying,  with  more  or  less  clear  appre- 


Dangers  and  Duties  15 

hension  of  it,  to  end  an  old  order  and  to  begin  a  new. 
And  their  sacrifice  is  calling  to  us  to  finish  what  they 
began. 

A  group  of  American  soldiers  were  billeted  in  a  little 
village  in  Northern  France  and  became  warmly  attached 
to  the  village  folk  and  the  villagers  to  them.  At  last  the 
lads  were  called  into  action  and  one  of  them  was  brought 
back  in  the  evening  to  be  laid  to  rest  in  the  soil  of  France. 
The  village  folk  spoke  to  their  priest  about  it  and  asked 
permission  to  bury  the  body  in  their  own  consecrated 
ground.  But  the  priest  said  it  could  not  be  done.  He 
was  a  good  lad  but  he  had  not  been  of  their  faith.  So 
they  dug  him  a  grave  just  outside  the  cemetery  wall  and 
laid  him  to  rest  there  as  close  as  might  be  to  their  own 
dead.  The  next  morning  the  villagers  went  by  and  to 
their  wonder  and  delight  they  found  the  grave  within 
the  wall.  The  old  priest  had  risen  in  the  night  and  moved 
the  wall. 

The  new  order  makes  its  demand.  The  walls  must 
be  moved  out.  There  must  be  room  for  the  spirit  of 
eight  million  men  who  died  for  a  larger  world.  They 
"bid  us  to  let  the  old  evils  go  and  to  bring  in  the  new 
good,  to  ring  out  the  slowly  dying  cause,  the  ancient  forms 
of  party  strife,  the  want,  the  care,  the  sin,  the  faithless 
coldness  of  the  times,  the  old  shapes  of  foul  disease,  the 
thousand  wars  of  old,  and  to  ring  in  the  nobler  modes 
of  life,  the  love  of  truth  and  right,  the  common  love  of 
good,  redress  to  all  mankind,  the  thousand  years  of  peace. 
The  dead  ask  this  of  us.  They  have  a  right  to  ask  it 
and  to  threaten  to  stir  beneath  the  Flanders  poppies  if 
we  will  not  hear.  And  another  and  greater  One  has  a 
right  to  ask  it  who  taught  us  to  pray,  and  meant  that  the 


1 6      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

prayer  should  be  sincere  and  true, —  Thy  Kingdom  come, 
Thy  Will  be  done  on  earth, —  in  America  and  in  the 
world  —  to-day,  as  it  is  in  heaven.  It  is  of  man's  dis- 
obedience and  failure,  not  of  God's  will,  if  that  Kingdom 
is  not  brought  nearer  now  by  many  a  long  year. 


II 

THE   PRESENT   BUSINESS   OF   THE   CHURCH 

The  Church  has  always  the  same  present  business.  It 
faces  new  problems,  new  tasks,  new  duties,  new  tests  with 
each  new  generation.  But  it  comes  to  each  new  situation 
with  ever  the  same  mission.  Old  vernaculars  pass  away 
and  men  speak  in  new  language.  But  the  Church  simply 
translates  into  the  new  speech  its  enduring  message.  The 
mission  and  message  of  the  Church,  its  first  and  last 
business  is  religion. 

The  Church  is  charged  with  this  unchanging  and  un- 
alterable business  because  human  need  is  unaltering  and 
unchanged.  The  miseries  and  failures  of  the  world  are 
all  traceable,  straight  past  everything  secondary  and  de- 
rivative, to  sin  and  irreligion,  to  wrong  and  ignorance. 
The  present  war  so  far  from  being  an  exception  is  itself 
the  tragic  symbol  of  this.  Dr.  Wotherspoon  of  Edin- 
burgh has  undauntedly  set  this  forth  in  one  of  the  most 
notable  sermons  of  the  times  entitled  '*  The  War  and  the 
Sin  of  the  World." 

"  If  we  may  assume  any  moral  system  for  the  universe 
or  any  God  who  judges  the  Earth,  we  may  also  assume  a 
connection  between  these  two  things  —  the  war  which  desolates 
the  world  and  the  sin  of  the  world.  Sin  when  it  is  finished 
brings  forth  death.  The  sin,  it  may  be  further  assumed,  is 
World  Sin;  not  the  sin  of  individuals  and  not  the  crime  of  some 

17 


1 8     The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

particular  date  —  the  war  is  a  world  war,  the  system  which 
has  collapsed  is  a  world  system;  the  process  leading  to  the 
collapse  must  be  traced  in  world  history.  It  is  our  general 
method  of  life  —  our  relation  to  that  whole  scheme  of  things 
which  includes  Heaven  with  Earth  and  God  with  ourselves 
—  which  has  broken  down,  and  is  judged,  and  is  condemned. 
The  relation  is  false,  the  method  is  unworkable  —  for  they 
have  led  us  to  this  which  we  see,  and  that  not  by  accident 
but  logically  and  naturally,  as  (if  they  persisted)  they  were 
bound  to  lead.  It  has  been  coming  for  long;  whoever  was 
not  blind  to  the  signs  of  the  times  could  see  it  coming  —  and 
now  it  has  come,  this  crash  of  our  life  —  of  which  the  war 
itself  is  only  a  symptom,  and  is  the  beginning  rather  than 
the  end." 

And  Dr.  Wotherspoon  goes  fearlessly  on: 

"In  spite  of  our  jealousies,  racial  and  political  rivalries  and 
divergencies,  the  group  of  peoples  which  share  the  European 
culture  form  a  unity,  moral  and  spiritual.  Seen  in  the  large, 
they  constitute  a  single  commonwealth.  They  have  one  eco- 
nomic life,  one  social  law,  one  standard  of  conduct,  and  one 
method  of  thought.  Their  science,  their  philosophies,  their 
literature,  their  criticism,  their  art,  their  religious  and  spiritual 
movements  —  even  their  fashions  and  their  caprices  and  their 
sports — are  international.  No  one  of  them  thinks  alone  or 
has  originality  enough  to  be  capable  of  intellectual  independence 
or  even  of  any  profound  social  eccentricity.  All  of  us  have 
built  upon  the  same  foundations  in  much  the  same  manner. 
If  there  is  sin,  it  is. sin  of  us  all,  systematic  sin,  sin  of  premiss, 
from  which  we  have  all  reasoned  to  similar  conclusions.  Not 
all  of  us  so  consistently  —  not  all  of  us  so  resolutely — not  all 
of  us  so  thoroughly  and  joyfully.  Whatever  credit  lies  in  lack 
of  logic,  some  of  us  may  claim  that  credit.  We  have  not  all 
finished  and  crowned  the  sin,  as  one  nation  has  done.  But  all 
have  sinned,  and  all  in  one  way.  '  The  War,'  writes  Mr. 
J.  H.  Campbell,  '  is  the  inevitable  outcome  of  the  ideals  whereby 
our  Western  civilization  has  been  living,  and  shows  in  what 
it  trusted,  and  demonstrated  its  lack  of  spiritual  consciousness.* 


The  Business  of  the  Church  19 

Long  ago  the  somber  but  powerful  imagination  of  Mr.  H.  G. 
Wells  had  discerned  this  inevitable,  and  had  warned  us  against 
*  the  hallucination  of  security,'  and  against  the  assumption  of 
an  automatic  '  progress  towards  which  men  had  no  moral 
responsibility,'  and  he  had  predicted  —  nay,  he  had  almost 
described  —  the  present  debacle,  of  which  he  discerned  the  seeds 
germinating  in  our  practice.  So,  too,  Mr.  E.  A.  Burroughs 
finds  it:  'The  war  (he  says)  is  the  vengeance  of  the  moral 
nature  upon  the  material.'  '  We  had  grown  accustomed  to 
measure  progress  in  material  terms  and  either  to  minimize  our 
moral  ailments  or  to  treat  them  with  material  remedies.'  Mr. 
Burroughs  will  excuse  none  of  us: — 'British  individualism  was 
in  its  way  as  much  a  form  of  animalism  and  atheism  as 
German  militarism  or  worship  of  expedience.'  '  No  part  of 
the  civilization  which  has  perished  (he  says  again)  can  plead 
Not  Guilty  to  a  share  in  the  responsibility  —  because  every- 
where the  new  paganism  was  already  working  in  greater  or 
less  degree  or  in  one  form  or  another.'  As  compared  with 
Germany,  '  the  rest  of  the  nations,  combatant  or  neutral,  are 
white  only  by  contrast  with  black,  and  would  if  contrasted 
with  white  be  very  gray  .  .  .  the  fall  of  Germany  is  a  common 
reproach  on  human  nature,  rather  than  ground  of  congratulation 
for  those  other  mortals  who  are  not  German.'  *  Others,  our- 
selves included,  have  deserved  the  cataclysm,'  though  only 
Germany  could  have  engineered   it. 

"  We  can,  in  fact,  learn  little  from  what  has  come  upon  us, 
unless  we  recognize  that  the  sin  which  Germany  has,  in  St. 
Paul's  sense  *  perfected,'  is  the  sin  of  the  world  —  a  radical  vice 
which  has  run  through  the  entire  social  detail  of  our  Western 
system;  unless  we  recognize  that  the  judgment  which  visits 
us  is  not  a  heterogeneous  retribution  —  as  a  man  might  be 
whipped  for  stealing,  the  whipping  having  no  relation  to  the 
theft  except  by  sentence  of  the  judge:  we  have  to  see  that  it 
is  strictly  the  death  which  that  particular  sin  contained:  we 
are  filled  with  the  fruit  of  our   own   devices. 

"  Nor  do  we  learn  much  unless  we  recognize  the  sin,  what 
it  is  —  that  it  is  the  sin  of  a  world  which  knows  God  and 
does  not  glorify  Him  as  God  —  which  does  not  like  to  have 
God   in   its   knowledge;    that   it   is   the   sin   of   a    Christendom 


20      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

•which  confesses  Christ,  but  will  not  have  Him  to  reign  ('His 
citizens  sent  after  Him,  saying  we  will  not  have  this  man 
to  reign  over  us'),  which  has  limited  His  authority  to  private 
occasions,  and  has  excluded  it  in  social  and  public  affairs;  a 
Christendom  which  has  told  Christ  to  mind  His  own  business 
(which  is  the  saving  of  souls),  and  to  let  society  and  the 
world  alone.  Germany  perfected  that  sin;  are  we  clear  of 
it?  When  we  saw  what  the  sin  perfected  is,  we  revolted 
from  it,  and  so  far  have  cleared  ourselves;  to  God  be  the 
praise.  But  hear  Mr.  Burroughs  again:  *  To  approve  an 
ideal,  or  even  to  fight  for  it,  is  nothing  unless  you  also  live 
by  it  and  for  it.'  We  have  still  that  to  do  —  when  it  is  no 
longer  necessary  to  fight,  then  to  live  by  the  truth  for  which 
we   have  fought." 

This  is  the  honest  diagnosis  of  the  well  nigh  fatal 
sickness  to  which  we  awakened  in  part  at  least  in  the 
war,  from  which  we  have  to  escape  and  from  which  we 
can  escape  in  but  one  way,  by  turning  in  peace  as,  in 
principle,  as  Mr.  Root  pointed  out,  we  did  turn  in  the 
war,  from  Paganism  with  its  principle  of  the  selfish  will 
to  Christianity  with  its  counter  principle  of  the  unselfish 
reason.  Colonel  Watterson,  whose  sight  grows  clearer  as 
the  evening  shadows  fall,  sees  this  among  his  discernings: 

"  Surely,"  said  he,  "  the  future  looks  black  enough,  yet  It 
holds  a  hope,  a  single  hope.  One,  and  one  power  only,  can 
arrest  the  descent  and  save  us.     That  is  the  Christian  religion. 

"  Democracy  is  but  a  side  issue.  The  paramount  issue  under- 
lying the  issue  of  Democracy,  is  the  religion  of  Christ,  and 
Him  crucified;  the  bedrock  of  civilization;  the  source  and 
resource  of  all  that  is  worth  having  in  the  world  that  is,  that 
gives  promise  in  the  world  to  come;  not  as  an  abstraction; 
not  as  a  huddle  of  sects  and  factions;  but  as  a  mighty  force 
and  principle  of  being.  The  Word  of  God,  delivered  by  the 
gentle  Nazarene  upon  the  hillsides  of  Judea,  sanctified  by  the 
Cross    of    Calvary,    has    survived    every    assault.     It    is    now 


The  Business  of  the  Church  21 

arrayed  upon  land  and  sea  to  meet  the  deadliest  of  all  assaults, 
Satan  turned  loose  for  one  last,  final  struggle.  .  .  . 

'*  If  the  world  is  to  be  saved  from  destruction  —  physical 
no  less  than  spiritual  destruction  —  it  will  be  saved  alone  by 
the  Christian  religion.  That  eliminated  leaves  the  earth  to 
eternal  war." 

The  business  of  the  Church  as  it  has  always  been,  and 
now  if  possible  more  than  it  has  ever  been,  is  religion. 
It  is  religion  more  truly  and  broadly  conceived  than  ever, 
more  conscious  of  its  social  responsibility  in  the  nation, 
alive  to  its  mission  as  the  instrumentality  of  true  racial 
interpretation  and  international  service  but  on  these  ac- 
counts all  the  more  personal  and  the  more  effective  in 
purifying  and  healing  the  individual  cells  of  the  organism 
of  each  national  society  and  of  the  body  of  humanity. 
We  may  think  as  freely  as  we  can  of  the  modes  of  re- 
ligious application  to  life  but  we  have  to  realize  more 
deeply  than  ever  the  need  of  its  judging  and  restoring 
power. 

To  these  ends  It  is  the  business  of  the  Church  to-day 
to  discern  clearly  and  to  preserve  the  true  sense  of  Its 
own  mission.  This  has  been  greatly  confused  by  the 
war.  In  which  the  Christian  Church  has  been  enlisted 
on  both  sides  of  a  struggle.  In  which  with  all  necessary 
qualification  we  believe  that  one  side  was  morally  right 
and  the  other  morally  wrong.  And  the  Church's  concep- 
tion of  Its  mission  was  already  sufficiently  blurred.  There 
were  too  many  among  us  who  saw  no  clear  distinction 
between  the  three  great  divine  institutions,  the  family, 
the  state  and  the  Church.  Confusion  was  not  unnatural. 
The  same  man  belonged  to  all  three  and  could  not  sepa- 
rate his  own  functlonings  In  his  home,  as  a  citizen  and  as 


22      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

a  Christian.  In  a  sense  they  can  never  be  separated. 
Each  of  them  is  an  institute  of  life  and  of  religion,  and 
history  is  the  development  of  each  in  itself  and  of  all  in 
their  interrelations.  But  the  three  institutions  are  there, 
nevertheless,  and  every  error  that  men  make  in  judging 
and  relating  them  brings  in  its  train  its  own  judgment. 
The  Church  at  least  must  realize  this  and  seek  to  protect 
itself  and  human  society  from  its  peril.  In  the  war, 
in  the  shaping  of  peace  and  in  the  new  conditions  of 
politics  and  industry  following  the  war  the  Church  needs 
to  know  that  it  has  a  mission  and  what  its  mission  is. 
The  Church  is  not  a  mere  agency  of  government,  nor  a 
convenient  channel  of  publicity,  nor  an  echo  of  the  state, 
nor  a  political  judge  and  divider.  It  is  a  ministry  of 
service,  a  fountain  of  moral  life  and  duty  and  a  witness 
to  enduring  and  universal  principles. 

There  is  no  room  here  to  deal  with  all  these  functions 
but  let  us  single  out  two  elements  of  the  Church's  busi- 
ness and  seek  to  make  them  clear.  It  is  the  business 
of  the  Church,  for  one  thing,  to  supply  ideals  for  society 
and  for  humanity  and  the  convictions  which  must  sustain 
such  ideals.  This  is  a  hopeful  time  in  which  to  proclaim 
the  generous  and  courageous  ideals  which  men  heard  from 
Jesus  on  the  hills  of  Galilee  and  which  the  first  Christian 
missionaries  carried  through  the  Roman  world.  The  dis- 
tortions of  those  ideals  which  were  seen  in  the  French 
Revolution  are  abroad  in  the  world  again  and  this  time 
they  are  closer  to  their  originals.  Mankind  has  a  heart 
for  hopes  and  dreams  and  endeavors  which  recall  the  eager 
days  at  the  beginning  of  our  national  history.  But  a  cen- 
tury has  brought  a  richer  and  truer  understanding  of  many 
things.     Old  vagaries  and  fallacies  and  false  trust  and  de- 


The  Business  of  the  Church  23 

ceptions  and  self  deceptions  are  with  us  still,  wearing  new 
faces  and  speaking  a  subtler  language.  But  this  is  only  to 
say  that  the  need  as  well  as  the  opportunity  for  the  Church 
to  go  about  its  business  of  proclaiming  the  principles  of 
the  Kingdom  of  God  is  greater  than  it  has  ever  been. 

And  what  are  the  fundamental  ideals  which  the  Church 
must  express?  Professor  William  Adams  Brown  has 
stated  them  with  sure  Christian  discernment  in  "  The 
Way  Out  "  to  be  righteousness,  repentance,  service  and 
faith. 

(i)  Righteousness.  Our  Lord  stated  this  clearly 
as  the  primary  thing  without  which  there  would  be 
no  beginning  and  no  going  on  except  to  evil  and  dis- 
aster. "  Seek  ye  first  the  Kingdom  of  God  and  His 
righteousness."  It  was  the  central  principle  of  His  own 
life  and  conduct.  *'  It  becometh  us  to  fulfill  all  right- 
eousness." It  is  what  God  is  before  He  can  be  thought 
of  as  being  anything  else.  "  Righteousness  and  jus- 
tice are  the  foundation  of  His  throne."  It  is  the 
only  foundation  of  human  society,  of  family  life,  of 
national  character,  of  a  world  order.  The  first  thing  is 
not  honor  or  glory  or  gain  or  power.  It  is  righteousness. 
The  business  of  the  Church  is  fearlessly  to  proclaim  this 
and  if  any  nation  commits  itself  to  courses  of  unrighteous- 
ness then  the  Church  has  its  work  set  before  it  which  it 
must  do  and  take  the  consequences.  The  Church  may 
be  sure  that  in  the  end  it  will  suffer  less  for  defending 
righteousness  than  for  supporting  a  state  in  wrong  doing. 
To-day  especially  the  message  of  the  Church  needs  to 
be  conceived  as  a  message  of  moral  and  social  and  economic 
and  political  righteousness.  The  Lord  Jesus  is  compas- 
sion but  He  is  also  truth.     And  it  is  refreshing  to  see 


24      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

that  latltudinarian  interpretations  of  the  Gospel  to  which 
we  have  been  accustomed  in  the  United  States  have 
grown  very  distasteful  during  the  war  and  that  some  of 
the  most  influential  preachers  of  a  lax  gospel  are  now 
become  the  prophets  of  the  righteous  law  of  God  and  the 
messengers  of  the  judgment  as  well  as  the  mercy  of  Christ. 
They  see  now  what  Mr.  Ikeda,  the  heroic  suffering 
Japanese  pastor,  saw  when  in  pain  and  poverty  he  spent 
his  ebbing  strength  on  the  Japanese  biography  of  St. 
Bernard.  A  friend  suggested  to  him  that  St.  Bernard 
was  but  little  known  in  Japan  and  that  a  life  of  St. 
Francis  would  be  more  popular  and  more  acceptable  to 
the  publishers.  Mr.  Ikeda  said  that  he  felt  that,  too, 
and  had  long  revered  St.  Francis,  but  there  was  a  reason. 
''  St.  Francis,"  said  he,  "  stands  for  Love  —  selfless,  gentle, 
self-sacrificing  love, —  love  alone.  There  is  great  power 
in  that,  but  it  is  not  enough.  There  is  evil  in  men's 
hearts,  and  that  evil  must  be  fought  against  and  subdued. 
Only  so  can  men  be  saved.  Not  St.  Francis,  but  St. 
Bernard  is  the  man  who  combines  in  himself  both  these 
principles,  love  and  the  aggressive,  fighting  spirit,  and  so 
I  thought  it  would  perhaps  serve  Christ  best  if  I  intro- 
duced St.  Bernard  to  the  Japanese  Church."  It  is  the 
principle  of  righteousness  alone  which  has  justified  our 
participation  in  the  war.  To  the  nation  believing  this, 
the  whole  claim  of  righteousness  between  nation  and 
nation,  and  class  and  class,  and  man  and  man,  and  of  a 
righteous  God,  and  the  sin  of  all  unrighteousness  may  be 
proclaimed  with  new  power. 

(2)  Repentance.  That  word  was  so  instantly  inter- 
twined with  righteousness  by  our  Lord  that  some  may 
dispute  whether  with  us  as  with  Him  it  does  not  belong 


The  Business  of  the  Church  25 

in  the  first  place.  At  any  rate  it  is  for  unrighteousness 
that  men  need  to  repent.  We  need  it.  Germany  and 
Austria  and  Turkey  need  it  to  be  sure.  But  men  and 
nations  must  do  their  own  repenting.  Others  can  not 
do  it  for  them.  We  need  to  do  our  own.  One  of  the 
most  curious  phenomena  of  the  war  has  been  the  resent- 
ment which  this  idea  has  encountered  in  Great  Britain 
and  America.  Any  reminder  that  we  had  motes  or  beams 
in  our  own  eyes,  that  the  hands  that  held  the  chalice 
of  freedom  in  the  name  of  God  must  be  clean,  that  the 
strength  of  ten  belongs  only  to  the  pure  heart,  was 
denounced  as  the  seditious  talk  of  a  pacifist,  forgetting 
that  the  battle  is  in  God's  hands  and  that  we  have  Him 
to  deal  with  as  well  as  the  enemy.  Perhaps  now  the 
word  of  truth  may  be  endured.  God  knows  how  deeply 
it  is  needed.  The  war  has  led  to  a  great  moral  cleansing 
in  America  but  the  work  has  only  begun  and  with  such 
unflinching  exposure  of  our  sins  and  such  sincere  peni- 
tence and  such  purpose  of  a  new  obedience  as  will  alone 
avert  God's  judgment  and  receive  His  blessing  men 
await  the  call  and  moral  leadership  of  the  Church.  **  I 
do  not  know  when  this  war  against  the  German  Empire 
will  come  to  an  end,"  said  the  Secretary  of  War  on 
November  4th,  "  but  I  know  this,  that  the  war  for  the 
salvation  of  young  American  manhood  has  only  just 
begun,  and  that  it  is  going  to  keep  up."  The  spirit  of 
penitence  alone,  not  the  spirit  of  the  Pharisee,  can  sustain 
this  war. 

(3)  Service.  The  participation  of  our  country  in  the 
war  was  simply  an  act  of  service  on  the  part  of  a  whole 
people.  We  saw  more  and  more  clearly  as  the  struggle 
went  on  that  we  had  vital  interests  at  stake  but  it  was  not 


26      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

for  interests  that  America  entered.  It  was  to  serve  the 
righteous  cause  and  mankind,  and  never  before  has  a 
nation  poured  out  such  energies  of  service  in  armies,  in 
relief,  in  welfare  ministry.  We  have  expressed  in  time 
of  war  the  enthusiasm  of  human  brotherhood,  of  the  equal 
liberty  of  mankind.  Whence  came  this  ideal  of  unselfish- 
ness, of  laying  down  our  life  for  others,  of  using  strength 
for  service,  of  living  and  dying  for  truth  and  for  hu- 
manity? Does  any  one  doubt  whence  it  came?  That 
ideal  of  service  at  any  cost,  of  doing  duty  for  nothing, 
of  counting  the  individual  in  his  interest  and  his  life  as 
only  a  means  of  advancement  for  the  whole  human  cause 
—  this  the  Church  must  hold  up  in  peace  when  it  will  be 
vastly  harder  for  men  to  live  by  it  than  it  was  in  war. 
(4)  Faith.  The  world  has  wrecked  its  material  in- 
terests for  the  sake  of  moral  ideals  and  ends.  Wealth 
and  ease  and  comfort  and  all  things  have  been  conceived 
in  their  true  character  as  means  to  invisible  ends.  The 
world,  as  will  be  pointed  out  later,  has  accepted  the  con- 
tention of  the  Christian  faith  that  the  supreme  values 
are  moral  and  unseen.  How  long  will  the  acceptance 
last?  We  may  be  sure  that  the  struggle  is  not  over. 
It  is  as  old  as  history.  The  eleventh  and  twelfth 
centuries  saw  it  in  strangely  confused  form  between  St. 
Anselm  and  William  the  Red.  We  shall  never  see  it 
in  that  form  again.  It  is  a  struggle  of  far  purer  prin- 
ciple now.  If  we  are  to  have  a  new  world  it  must  be 
built  upon  the  foundation  of  faith,  Jesus  Christ  Him- 
self being  the  chief  corner  stone.  To  speak  this  word 
of  faith  is  the  present  business  of  the  Church  —  faith 
in  God,  in  the  reality  and  supremacy  of  the  moral  and 
spiritual  values,  interests  and  forces,  faith  in  man.     This 


The  Business  of  the  Church  27 

last  not  least.  We  need  to  acquire  the  human  faith 
which  Paul  held  and  to  which  he  called  men,  **  faith 
in  the  Lord  Jesus  and  unto  all  saints."  (Eph.  1.15.) 
We  have  reaped  enough  death  from  human  envy  and 
distrust. 

It  is  the  business  of  the  Church  to  be  the  deliverer 
of  this  message  of  righteousness,  repentance,  service  and 
faith  in  each  nation.  It  is  to  be  also  an  international 
instrumentality,  the  institute  of  humanity,  as  the  family 
is  the  institute  of  the  affections  and  the  state  the  institute  of 
rights.  One  great  source  of  our  troubles  has  been  our 
racial  and  national  isolation  and  selfishness.  The  war  has 
been  at  once  the  fruit  and  the  corrective  of  this.  For  the 
corrective  we  have  every  reason  to  be  thankful.  We 
have  been  taught  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  comfort- 
able separation  from  the  rest  of  the  world.  We  may 
disbelieve  in  entangling  alliances  but  there  is  no  escape 
from  the  entanglements.  We  see  that  our  own  safety 
depends  on  conditions  without.  We  do  not  talk  now 
of  saving  America  to  save  the  world  but  of  saving  the 
world  in  order  to  save  America.  To  make  American 
democracy  safe  we  have  had  to  wage  a  war  in  Europe. 
The  Church  has  a  work  of  redemption  to  do  among  these 
interests  and  ideas.  It  ought  to  conserve  the  good  of 
nationalism,  disciplining  and  inspiring  the  genius  of  each 
separate  nation.  And  it  ought  to  master  its  evil  in  the 
interest  of  humanity  and  reveal  to  each  nationality  its 
true  glory  which  is  to  be  found  in  the  perfection  of 
national  character  and  the  fulfillment  of  national  power 
as  the  essential  contribution  of  each  people  to  the  full 
life  of  the  whole  of  mankind. 

The  Church's  universal  business  was  never  clearer. 


28      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

The  central  organizations  of  Islam  have  broken  down. 
Mecca  remains  but  not  the  Mecca  of  old.  Some  day 
even  the  long  sealed  city  will  be  a  mission  station,  while 
already  the  iron  bands  that  girt  the  Mohammedan  peo- 
ples and  the  Mohammedan  faith  have  been  rent.  New 
ties  of  sympathy  and  of  confidence  relate  the  Latin  Ameri- 
can nations  to  us  and  new  realizations  of  moral  and  social 
need  open  them  to  the  Bible,  and  the  Living  Christ. 
The  streams  of  democratic  influence  and  of  moral  energy 
springing  from  one  great  fountain,  though  flowing  through 
various  channels,  are  pouring  up  through  the  forms  and 
institutions  of  government  and  society  in  Japan.  The 
critical  period  in  Chinese  history  is  too  analogous  to  the 
corresponding  years  in  our  own  national  past  to  leave  us 
cold  or  unsympathetic  toward  the  struggle  of  the  contend- 
ing forces  of  corruption  and  progress  in  China,  where  it 
can  not  be  that  God  will  allow  the  evil  to  prevail,  and 
where  all  that  is  true  and  honest  calls  for  Christianity 
as  the  one  hope  of  the  nation.  In  India  the  British  Gov- 
ernment is  redeeming  its  pledges  of  the  past  and  providing 
for  a  measure  of  self-government  that  will  put  great 
sections  of  India's  affairs  in  the  hands  of  the  Indian 
people  themselves,  and  that  will  reveal  to  India  more 
clearly  than  it  has  yet  been  revealed  the  incompatibility 
of  Hinduism  and  Islam  alike  with  free  institutions  and 
democratic  brotherhood.  And  the  war  clouds  which  have 
darkened  Europe  have  not  illuminated  Africa,  although 
they  have  helped  Africa  to  realize  its  need  of  light.  And 
in  South  Eastern  Asia  —  the  Philippine  Islands  and  Siam, 
so  alike  and  so  different,  a  people  awakened  and  a 
people  to  be  awakened,  want  what  politics  and  trade 
can  give  in  part  but  yet  can  not  give  at  all  —  a  new 


The  Business  of  the  Church  29 

quickening  of  life,   a  new  strength  of  soul,  a  salvation 
which  can  come  by  Christ  alone. 

There  may  be  diversity  of  judgment  as  to  the  method 
by  w^hich  the  Church  shall  function  as  the  institute  of 
humanity,  whether,  as  some  think,  by  seeking  to  spread 
an  international  ecclesiastical  organization  or,  as  others 
of  us  believe,  by  fostering  in  each  nation  its  own  living 
Christian  agency,  which  shall  supply  the  directing  principle 
of  the  national  genius.  But  however  we  may  differ  as 
to  the  method,  the  end  is  clear.  We  must  replace  the 
ideals  and  fears  and  organizations  of  war  by  the  ideals 
and  hopes  and  organizations  of  peace.  Cooperation  and 
common  gain  must  be  substituted  for  conflict  and  partisan 
advantage.  ''  Peace  to  find  United  States  ready  for  War 
of  Trade,"  in  the  "  War  after  the  War  " —  these  are 
phrases  from  a  newspaper  account  of  the  Fifth  National 
Foreign  Trade  Convention  held  in  Cincinnati  in  April, 
19 1 8.  But  the  Church  must  preach  a  new  order  of 
helpful  association  from  which  all  shall  gain,  not  a  war 
of  interest  against  interest  in  which  both  must  ultimately 
lose.  In  government  as  in  trade,  the  Church  has  an 
ideal  and  a  spirit  to  offer  to  men.  And  the  wise  and 
true  men  are  laying  hold  upon  it.  Viscount  Grey  is 
uttering  a  religious  word  when  he  lays  it  down  as  one 
of  the  foundations  of  the  League  of  Nations  "  that  the 
Governments  and  peoples  of  the  States  willing  to  found 
it  understand  clearly  that  it  will  impose  some  limitations 
upon  the  national  action  of  each,  and  may  entail  some 
inconvenient  obligation.  Smaller  and  weaker  nations  will 
have  rights  that  must  be  respected  and  upheld  by  the 
league.  Stronger  nations  must  forego  the  right  to  make 
their  interests  prevail  against  the  weaker  by  force,  and 


30     The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

all  States  must  forego  the  right  in  any  dispute  to  resort 
to  force  before  other  methods  of  settlement  by  confer- 
ence, conciliation,  or  if  need  be  arbitration,  have  been 
tried.  This  is  the  limitation.  The  obligation  is  that  if 
any  nation  will  not  observe  this  limitation  upon  its  na- 
tional actions,  if  it  breaks  the  agreement  which  is  the 
basis  of  the  league,  rejects  all  peaceful  methods  of  settle- 
ment and  resorts  to  force  against  another  nation,  they 
must  one  and  all  use  their  combined  force  against  it." 
This  is  only  the  word  of  order  and  of  righteousness. 

And  not  in  commerce  and  government  only  but  in  race 
relationship,  which  is  the  hardest  problem  of  all,  the 
Church's  principle  is  our  only  salvation.  Race  must 
be  subordinated  to  humanity.  The  power  of  the  crude 
results  of  Darwin's  influence  must  be  broken  and  we  must 
reestablish  Christ's.  The  end  of  humanity  is  not  race 
warfare  eliminating  the  weak.  It  is  race  fellowship  per- 
fecting the  family  life  of  God  upon  the  earth.  In  our 
new  and  consolidated  world  the  present  business  of  the 
Church  is  to  supply  humanity  with  its  instrumentality 
of   self-fulfillment. 

And  yet  how  can  the  thing  that  needs  to  be  redeemed 
be  its  own  self  fulfiller?  This  is  the  tragic  problem  of 
the  new  day.  How  can  the  new  world  that  is  to  be 
hereafter  be  made  out  of  the  old  breed  of  men?  Saint 
Brice,  caustically  criticizing  President  Wilson's  address 
before  the  Senate  on  January  24,  19 17,  declared  in 
the  Paris  Journal:  **  The  situation  would  appear  in- 
extricable if  we  did  not  realize  how  the  pursuit  of  a 
fixed  idea  may  lead  astray.  Wilson  is  haunted  by  the 
idea  of  inaugurating  the  golden  age  of  universal  brother- 
hood.    Naturally,  general  disarmament  is  the  basis  of  this 


The  Business  of  the  Church  31 

system.  The  only  thing  lacking  for  the  realization  of 
this  admirable  conception  is  a  new  humanity.  Does 
Wilson  pretend  to  be  able  to  change  humanity?"  Hu- 
man progress  does  not  need  to  wait  for  the  total  perfec- 
tion of  humanity.  We  have  got  rid  of  many  evils  even 
if  humanity  has  not  as  yet  been  so  greatly  changed  and 
we  hope  that  we  can  get  rid  of  war  too  with  humanity 
as  it  is  or  as  it  is  becoming.  But  Saint  Brice's  demand 
is  just.  Man  himself  is  still  the  greatest  element  in 
his  own  problem.  How  is  he  to  be  made  new?  What 
agency  but  the  Church  knows  where  the  power  to  effect 
the  change  can  be  found?  We  are  back  once  more  at 
the  beginnings  and  the  last  word  is  the  first.  "  Ye  must 
be  born  again."  What  greater  business  could  the  Church 
have  than  to  lead  men  to  the  one  Source  and  Strength 
adequate  both  to  generate  the  new  life  which  they  need 
and  to  provide  that  life  with  the  forms  of  action  through 
which  it  shall  do  its  work  and  bear  its  fruitage  in  the 
nation  and  throughout  the  world? 


Ill 


THE   EFFECT   OF  THE   WAR    ON   CHRISTIAN    CONVICTIONS 
AND   IDEALS 

But  has  not  the  war  produced  an  atmosphere  in  which 
the  Church  if  it  conceives  its  business  in  the  terms  just 
described,  will  be  speaking  without  any  audience?  And 
are  not  the  values  which  now  appeal  to  men  utterly 
diverse  from  all  that  the  Church  can  offer?  Not  a  bit 
of  it.  The  experience  of  the  war  has  clarified  and  con- 
firmed our  fundamental  religious  ideas  and  revealed  the 
power  of  their  appeal  to  the  present  day  mind.  It  has 
unmistakably  set  in  the  supreme  place  those  moral  and 
spiritual  principles  which  constitute  the  message  of  the 
Church  and  it  has  revealed  the  responsiveness  of  men  to 
the  essential  ethical  ideals  of  Christianity. 

The  war  has  not  dissolved  the  great  convictions  of 
Christianity  about  God  and  man,  about  the  Church  and 
the  Cross,  about  prayer  and  about  Jesus  Christ. 

It  has  disclosed  the  depth  of  our  human  belief  in  God. 
One  met  no  atheists  in  the  army  and  navy.  The  skep- 
ticism and  materialistic  doctrine  of  the  last  fifty  years 
may  have  left  deep  moral  scars  upon  the  western  world. 
It  undoubtedly  made  the  war  possible.  But  it  evidently 
affected  only  in  the  most  superficial  way  the  real  instinct 
of  men  toward  the  idea  of  God.  It  was  never  necessary 
in  the  camps  or  in  France  to  prove  the  existence  of  God. 

Z2 


The  Effect  of  the  War  33 

The  enormous  tide  of  life  which  was  running  swept  men 
past  the  traditional  intellectual  difficulties  and  made  the 
mechanistic  chatter  of  the  past  generation  seem  meaning- 
less. Men  knew  God  was  awaiting  just  beyond  the 
next  moment.  Or  they  had  a  rendezvous  with  him  the 
day  following  or  that  day  fortnight.  What  nonsense  was 
this  that  there  was  no  God?  They  knew  better.  They 
felt,  confused  as  the  idea  might  be,  that  they  were  en- 
gaged in  His  business  and  expected  to  report  to  Him 
soon.  A  Belgian  chaplain  told  me  that  in  the  first  year 
of  the  war  the  Belgian  soldiers,  free  thinkers,  Roman 
Catholics  and  men  of  no  thought  at  all  poured  in  their 
questions  for  help  and  strengthening  and  their  ideas  cen- 
tered on  four  great  themes  —  God,  sin,  prayer,  and  nour- 
ishment, not  for  the  body  but  for  the  soul.  So  among 
our  own  soldiers  and  sailors  the  outstanding  fact  has 
been  an  instinctive  trust  and  assurance  regarding  God. 
And  the  war  has  not  only  revealed  this  widespread,  almost 
universal,  theistic  attitude,  it  has  strengthened  it.  It 
has  done  so  by  assuring  men  of  a  righteous  moral  govern- 
ment of  the  world.  They  have  seen  in  the  war  the 
judgment  of  God  striking  home  upon  the  third  and  fourth 
generation  of  Frederick  the  Great  who  pretended  to 
believe  in  Him  and  who  mocked  the  law  of  His  righteous- 
ness. Sin  has  paid  its  penalty  before  their  eyes,  the  sin 
of  Germany,  their  own  sin.  There  is  God,  they  have 
said  to  themselves,  and  He  is  a  just  and  almighty  God. 
Furthermore  the  very  sufferings  of  the  war,  its  pain  and 
agony,  have  helped  many  men  in  their  faith  in  God. 
The  suffering  and  pain  of  the  universe  have  often  been 
a  difficulty  in  the  way  of  a  theistic  belief.  And  the 
agony  and  blood  of  war  have  made  it  hard  to  reconcile 


34      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

war  with  a  divine  government  of  the  world.  But  why? 
Is, there  not  anguish  and  blood  \x\  maternity?  And  yet 
maternity  is  the  divinest  and  holiest  thing  we  know  in 
human  life.  It  brings  God  nearest.  St.  Paul  even  made 
a  bold  declaration  about  it,  which  theologians  have  been 
busy  ever  since  in  explaining  away,  to  the  effect  that 
it  had  a  redeeming  grace  in  it.  Now  men  have  experi- 
enced a  sort  of  moral  equivalent  of  the  pain  and  peril 
of  childbirth.  So  the  soldier  has  found  the  suffering  of 
war  not  a  stumbling  block  in  the  way  of  a  faith  in  God 
but  a  positive  reassurance.  "  God  is  righteous  and  He 
suffers,"  the  wounded  man  has  said  to  himself,  "  I  am 
suffering  and  I  have  been  ready  to  die  for  righteousness. 
I  know  a  bit  about  God.  I  am  sure  He  is  there."  The 
soldier  knows  the  truth  which  Walt  Whitman  put  in 
words : 

"  And  I  say  to  Mankind,  Be  not  anxious  about  God, 

For  I  who  am  curious  abojt  each  am  not  curious  about  God. 
No  array  of  terms  can  say  how  much  I  am  at  peace  about  God 
and  about  Death." 

And  this  is  not  all.  The  soldier  and  sailor  believed  in 
God  indeed.  But  also  it  is  the  God  of  the  Bible  they 
believed  in,  not  the  God  of  natural  theology  or  the  differ- 
ent God  of  the  new  theology.  The  war  has  influenced 
more  than  the  soldier  in  this.  It  has  been  interesting 
to  see  the  change  that  has  passed  over  some  of  the  liberal 
theological  journals.  Some  of  those  which  before  the  war 
could  not  tolerate  a  God  of  judgment  and  righteousness, 
but  would  allow  only  a  God  of  such  good  nature  that  He 
could  be  trusted  to  pass  over  everything,  are  now  sternest 
in  their  faith  in  a  God  "  most  just  and  terrible  in  His 


The  Effect  of  the  War  35 

judgment;  hating  all  sin  and  who  will  by  no  means  clear 
the  guilty."  The  war  has  restored  and  made  clear  and 
firm  to  multitudes  of  men,  for  a  little  season  at  least, 
the  assurance  of  a  just  and  good  and  real  God. 

As  to  man,  also,  the  war  has  confirmed  the  traditional 
doctrine  of  the  Church.  The  Christian  doctrine  of  man 
has  quite  openly  and  boldly  asserted  a  paradox.  It  has 
denied  that  man  holds  by  the  beast.  It  has  taught  that 
he  was  a  son  of  God,  that  God  Himself  took  on  his 
nature  in  the  Incarnation,  that  he  was  made  a  little 
lower  than  the  angels,  that  he  was  not  of  the  order  of 
nature  alone  but  had  kinships  out  of  nature  in  God,  that 
however  sin  and  moral  failure  might  have  damaged  him 
there  were  still  indestructible  possibilities  and  moral  ca- 
pacities, which  would  respond  to  the  call  of  God  or  to 
the  summons  of  duty  which  is  the  Voice  of  God.  Christi- 
anity flatly  denied  the  materialistic  theory  as  to  the  nature 
of  man.  On  the  other  hand  it  unflinchingly  recognized 
the  facts  of  man's  appalling  gift  for  moral  degradation. 
It  knew  and  proclaimed  the  untruth  of  those  transcen- 
dental exaggerations  of  the  loftiness  of  human  nature 
which  still  lingered  among  us  and  of  all  those  rosy  pictures 
of  man's  character  which  forget  sin  and  the  deadly  realities 
of  moral  deficiency.  Christianity,  which  began  with  the 
experience  of  the  rejection  by  men  of  the  highest  and 
holiest  character  ever  known  and  which  saw  in  the  cruci- 
fixion of  Christ  the  limit  to  which  human  nature  could 
sink  in  its  self  revelation  of  shame  and  cowardice,  simply 
told  man  the  truth  about  himself,  that  he  was  the  son 
of  a  brute  with  a  brute's  possibilities  latent  in  him. 
This  double,  self-contradictory  view,  constituted  the  tra- 
ditional anthropology  of  the  Church.     The  war  has  sub- 


36      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

stantiated  ft  in  every  detail.  It  has  revealed  the  divinity 
in  man.  The  w^orld  itself,  wt  may  say,  to  borrow  a 
phrase  of  St.  John's,  could  not  contain  the  books  that 
might  be  written  of  the  heroism,  the  unselfishness,  the 
modesty,  the  good  cheer,  the  love,  the  sacrifice,  the  loy- 
alty, the  devotion,  the  honor,  the  kindness,  the  forgiveness, 
the  courage,  the  tenacity,  the  justice,  the  goodness,  the 
true  Godlikeness  which  have  been  displayed  by  soldiers, 
sailors,  civilians,  fathers,  mothers,  wives,  boys  and  girls, 
young  and  old.  *'  When  I  think  of  this  war  and  of  the 
hell  which  men  are  making  of  the  world,"  said  a  woman 
at  the  beginning  of  the  struggle,  "  I  wish  I  were  a  dog." 
*'  Was  there  ever  a  more  glorious  day,"  said  a  man  who 
heard  of  her  remark.  "'  I  am  proud  to  be  alive  now. 
Why,  you  can  get  a  man  to  die  for  anything."  Man- 
kind has  shown  itself  to  be  capable  of  any  task  or  sacri- 
fice however  great.  Out  of  the  lowest,  leadenest  lives 
the  golden  and  shining  deeds  have  come.  The  trans- 
forming influences  of  duty,  of  a  comrade's  call  for  help, 
of  hardship  without  resting,  of  dogged  persistence  in  a 
cause  seen  to  be  God's  cause  and  worth  life  and  death, 
have  worked  in  hundreds  of  thousands  of  men  the  miracle 
of  glorified  character,  of  character  glorified  at  least  in 
the  moment  and  article  of  utter  loyalty,  derisive  of  all 
melodrama,  simply  and  stodgily  doing  what  had  to  be 
done  and  what  was  right,  that  God's  truth  might  not  be 
trampled  down.  The  war  has  shown  what  a  glorious 
work  God  did  in  making  man.  But  it  has  shown  too 
what  a  beastly,  degraded,  unspeakable  thing  man  can 
be.  War  itself  in  its  reality,  not  in  its  idealization,  is 
of  the  dirt.  It  requires  dirt  life.  *'  Yes,"  said  an 
experienced  Belgian  soldier,   "  there  are  glories  of  war 


The  Effect  of  the  War  37 

but  war  is  blackness.  The  glories  are  like  a  few  stars 
shining  in  dark  night  and  the  dark  night  is  war."  War 
has  shown  the  soldier's  responsiveness  and  his  irresponsi- 
bility, his  willingness  to  give  up  everything  and  his  easy 
subsidence  into  the  idea  that  everything  must  be  given 
to  him,  his  tenacity  and  his  vacillation,  his  self  control 
and  his  self  indulgence,  his  good  nature  and  his  ingrati- 
tude, his  discipline  and  his  disloyalty,  his  thrift  and  his 
wastefulness,  his  nobility  and  his  bestiality.  The  atroci- 
ties and  crimes  which  have  been  perpetrated  have  shown 
what  man  will  do  to  make  war  frightful  and  to  prove  that 
man  is  not  a  son  of  God  but  a  son  of  the  devil.  But 
apart  from  these  evidences  of  man's  depravity  we  see 
against  the  background  of  honor  and  light  among  our  own 
people,  soldier  and  civilian,  those  who  have  gone  and  those 
who  have  stayed,  the  shadows  of  weakness  and  reaction 
and  failure.  The  war  has  reaffirmed  the  Christian  view 
of  the  anomaly  of  the  dignity  and  depravity  of  man. 

But  has  not  the  war  once  for  all  discredited  the  Church? 
We  have  been  told  that  it  has,  that  it  has  won  for  the 
Y.  M.  C.  A.  and  the  Y.  W.  C.  A.  and  the  K.  of  C. 
and  the  Salvation  Army  a  place  of  undying  affection  and 
gratitude  in  the  mind  of  the  soldier,  but  that  the  absence 
of  the  Church  as  such  and  of  its  direct  representatives 
from  the  camps  and  from  the  army  and  the  recollection 
among  the  soldiers  of  the  sectarianism  and  dead  tradition- 
alism, the  negative  morality  and  the  religious  selfishness 
and  want  of  democracy  in  the  home  churches  contrasted 
with  the  unity  and  vitality  and  unselfishness  and  brother- 
hood of  the  army,  have  bred  in  the  soldier  a  disgust  with 
the  Church  from  which  it  will  suffer  for  many  a  day. 
All  this  and  a  great  deal  more  we  have  heard  over  and 


38      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

over  again  from  all  sorts  of  people  and  in  all  sorts  of 
places,  troop-ships  and  troop-trains,  hospitals,  pulpits  and 
magazine  articles.  But  the  facts,  what  are  the  facts? 
I  venture  to  say  in  the  teeth  of  all  this  that  the  Church 
and  its  ministry  came  out  of  the  war  with  more  of  the 
respect  and  affection  of  the  soldier  and  the  sailor  than 
any  auxiliary  agency,  however  useful  and  efficient  it  has 
been.  A  great  deal  of  criticism  has  fallen  upon  some 
of  those  agencies,  but  not  more  than  the  soldiers  and 
sailors  have  poured  out  on  the  army  and  navy  them- 
selves. Some  of  it  has  no  doubt  been  warranted:  most 
of  it  wholly  unjust.  It  will  soon  pass  over  and  the 
good  and  faithful  service  rendered  will  be  forever  remem- 
bered. But  the  Church  has  not  been  dishonored  by  their 
usefulness.  They  have  avowed  their  right  relations  to 
the  churches  and  have  acknowledged  that  all  their  service 
was  in  the  name  of  the  Church.  It  was  the  Christian 
Church  which  accomplished  whatever  good  was  done  and 
as  they  reflect  upon  it  soldiers  and  sailors  will  see  this. 
And  the  Church  was  there  in  army  and  navy  not  only  in 
all  forms  of  auxiliary  service  but  also  in  the  3,000  chap- 
lains, including  the  pick  of  the  younger  men  in  the  min- 
istry and  the  priesthood.  Hundreds  of  these  men  won 
the  eternal  love  and  admiration  of  those  they  served,  and 
represented  to  them  the  noblest  ideals  of  character  and 
comradeship.  Whether  the  soldier  has  learned  to  abhor 
sectarianism,  selfishness,  negative  morality,  and  the  want 
of  democracy  in  the  Church  will  remain  to  be  seen.  Let 
us  pray  that  he  has.  If  he  has  it  will  be  to  the  vast  advan- 
tage of  the  Church.  For  there  is  scarcely  one  American 
community  where  there  is  not  more  factionalism  in  poli- 
tics, in  racial  and  national  sentiment  and  in  society  than 


The  Effect  of  the  War  39 

there  is  in  any  church  in  the  community  or  between  all 
the  churches  of  the  community,  where  there  is  not  more 
selfishness  in  business  and  in  social  life  than  there  is  in 
theology  and  religion,  where  the  churches  do  not  repre- 
sent more  ethical  positiveness  than  the  courts,  the  local 
philanthropies  and  especially  the  modern  agencies  of  social 
service,  and  where  the  ordinary  Christian  congregation 
does  not  represent  a  meeting  place  of  more  classes  and 
social  groups  than  are  brought  together  in  any  other 
association  of  the  community  and  of  far  more  democracy 
than  characterizes  ordinary  personal  or  neighborhood  re- 
lationships. All  impulses  such  as  these  in  men's  hearts 
to-day  are  helpful,  not  hurtful  to  the  Church  and  to  the 
churches,  even  as  they  are,  with  all  their  shortcomings. 
But  in  deeper  ways  than  these  the  war  has  confirmed 
the  doctrine  and  ideal  of  the  Christian  Church,  has  re- 
vealed the  strength  of  its  appeal  to  men's  hearts  and  has 
prepared  the  way  for  a  more  effective  approach  on  the 
part  of  the  Church  to  the  men  as  they  return  home.  The 
word  "  Church  "  is  a  word  used  in  many  meanings.  I 
am  speaking  of  it  now  as  a  mystical  body,  visible  in  partial 
and  defective  forms,  representing  as  in  a  human  body  unity 
of  life  rather  than  uniformity  of  function,  and  embodying 
in  the  richest  and  subtlest  ways  of  which  we  can  conceive 
the  social,  collective  principle.  The  war  has  shown  the 
reality  of  forces  in  which  the  mechanistic  interpretation 
of  life  has  disbelieved  and  which  may  be  partially  de- 
scribed but  cannot  be  accounted  for  by  genetic  psychology. 
It  has  demonstrated  the  reality  of  the  unity  of  the  life 
spirit,  its  immense  momentum,  the  power  of  corporate 
interests  and  sentiments  to  pick  up  individuals  and  endue 
them  with  the  energies  and  ideals  of  the  body.     There 


40     The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

has  been  something  mystical  and  infinitely  hopeful  in  the 
evidence  of  the  truth  of  social  character,  social  purpose, 
social  consecration.  Society  has  furnished  multitudes  of 
men  with  spiritual  conceptions  and  ethical  impulse  of 
which  they  had  been  individually  wholly  incapable.  The 
army  picked  up  the  weakling,  the  helpless,  the  incompetent 
and  again  and  again  by  the  sheer  upholding  force  of  the 
mass  bore  these  men  along  on  a  tide  of  service  and  achieve- 
ment possible  only  to  a  corporate  and  communized  devo- 
tion. We  have  seen  in  military  and  political  life  proof 
of  the  reality,  and  faint  illustration  of  the  measure,  of 
the  truth  of  the  New  Testament  idea  of  the  Church  as 
the  body  of  Christ,  in  which  the  life  of  the  body  controls 
and  feeds  and  uses  all  the  members.  What  we  felt  after 
in  the  war  under  the  necessity  and  compulsion  of  national 
unity  the  Church  of  Christ  was  established  to  interpret 
and  to  provide.  Men  have  experienced  now  its  possi- 
bility and  have  seen  what  any  small  measure  of  its  pos- 
session may  do  for  the  nation  and  for  mankind. 

And  still  further  the  war  ought  to  have  dispelled  com- 
pletely the  foolish  idea  that  historic  and  sacramental 
religion  is  an  anachronism,  to  be  displaced  by  pragmatic 
or  purely  ethical  religious  conceptions.  The  religion 
which  appealed  to  men  was  a  religion  of  full  loyalty  to 
the  actual  person,  Jesus  Christ,  which  could  speak  an 
authentic  word  about  Him,  which  could  say,  "  I  know 
Him.  Let  me  introduce  you  to  Him."  And  it  was  the 
Churches  which  could  feed  men  upon  Him  in  the  sacra- 
ment, and  nerve  them  by  the  power  of  the  sense  of  His 
communicated  life,  to  which  men  came  with  hunger  and 
respect.  In  the  British  army  there  were  regiments  that 
would  not  go  into  battle  without  their  chaplains  or  until 


The  Effect  of  the  War  41 

they  had  been  led  to  the  Lord's  Supper.  Among  our 
American  troops  the  Communion  Service  filled  an  ever 
enlarging  place.  A  friend  who  was  serving  at  Camp 
Merritt,  the  embarkation  camp  at  Tenafly,  N.  J.,  told 
me  that  one  night  he  had  gone  to  bed  weary  at  mid- 
night. About  one  o'clock  he  was  awakened  by  the  open- 
ing of  his  door  and  the  shining  of  a  light  on  his  face.  He 
opened  his  eyes  and  saw  an  officer  standing  in  the  door- 
way. *'  I  am  sorry  to  trouble  you,"  said  he,  ''  but  the 
men  are  leaving  to-night  and  they  do  not  want  to  go 
without  a  prayer.  Would  you  come  out  to  them?"  It 
was  customary  for  the  troops  to  be  sent  out  during  the 
night  to  the  trains  or  to  the  lighters  which  took  them  to 
the  transports  at  Hoboken.  My  friend  rose  at  once  to 
go  out  to  the  men  for  a  last  prayer  before  they  started 
overseas.  The  officer  waited  for  them.  As  he  came  out 
of  the  door  the  officer  said,  "  If  it  could  be,  sir,  they  would 
like  the  sacrament  too."  My  friend  took  his  chalice  and 
a  package  of  wafers  which  he  felt  sure  would  suffice 
and  went  out  into  the  night.  The  moon  was  shining  and 
the  men  were  standing  in  the  company  street  with  their 
packs  beside  them.  He  spoke  a  few  words  and  offered 
prayer  and  then  invited  those  who  wished  to  partake  to 
pass  by  and  as  they  passed  he  dipped  the  wafers  in  the 
wine  and  served  them  one  by  one.  Soon  he  realized  that 
his  supply  would  run  short  and  he  broke  the  wafers  in 
halves  and  then  in  quarters  and  then  as  the  men  still  came 
could  only  touch  the  wine  to  their  lips.  They  were  not 
all  church  members.  Probably  only  a  few  of  them  were. 
There  may  have  been  elements  of  superstition  in  their 
desire.  But  there  was  reality.  And  when  the  last  man 
had  come  they  stood  for  a  moment  of  silence  and  then 


42      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

passed  on  Into  the  night  and  across  the  sea  to  France 
and  to  death  and  to  the  life  that  is  beyond  death  where  One 
drinks  wine  new  with  men  in  the  Kingdom  of  His  Father. 
Incidents  like  these  happened  by  the  score.  Men  wanted 
the  nourishment  of  the  body  and  blood  of  Christ.  The 
idea  of  it  was  no  fanciful  idea  to  them.  The  sacramental 
service  of  the  Church  gained  a  new  recognition  and  a 
grateful  acceptance  amid  the  horrors  and  night  of  the  war. 
But  the  symbol  of  Christianity  which  the  war  made 
most  conspicuous  was  the  Cross  of  Christ.  Three  of  the 
great  principles  which  are  embodied  in  the  Cross  were 
dominant  principles  in  the  war,  the  principle  of  abandon- 
ment, of  the  letting  go  of  all  agencies  and  tasks  but  life, 
of  achievement  by  life  and  by  the  power  of  the  spirit; 
the  principle  of  freedom,  of  contempt  for  all  accouter- 
ment  and  acquisition ;  and  the  principle  of  atonement,  of 
the  work  of  unity  by  means  of  surrender,  of  the  use  of 
death  to  end  death,  (a)  The  Cross  represented  the 
principle  of  abandonment.  ''  When  He  had  by  Himself 
purged  our  sins,"  says  the  writer  of  the  Epistle  to  the 
Hebrews,  *'  He  sat  down  on  the  right  hand  of  the  Maj- 
esty on  high."  The  later  texts  reject  the  words  "  by 
Himself  "  as  a  gloss,  but  the  idea  is  there  none  the  less 
in  the  mood  of  the  verb.  He  did  it  by  Himself,  not  by 
anything  outside  of  Himself.  He  used  His  life  for  it. 
That  was  the  central  lesson  of  the  war.  We  have  read 
all  over  the  nation  the  challenging  signs,  *'  Food  will  win 
the  war."  "  Ships  will  win  the  war."  "  Bonds  will  win 
the  war."  But  while  the  war  would  not  have  been  won 
without  bonds  and  ships  and  food,  they  did  not  win  it. 
Why  were  they  needed  at  all?  In  the  interest  of  men. 
Bonds  were   needed   to   equip   them,   ships   to   transport 


The  Effect  of  the  War  43 

them,  food  to  sustain  them.  But  it  took  life,  not  the 
weapons  or  agencies  of  life,  to  achieve  victory.  The  w^ar 
has  shown,  as  Paul  taught,  that  we  are  saved  by  His 
life,  poured  out  on  the  cross,  poured  out  now  through 
men.  (b)  The  Cross  represented  the  principle  of  free- 
dom. Jesus  Christ  moved  on  an  orbit  of  liberty.  Neither 
property  nor  tradition  nor  conventions  ever  bound  Him. 
He  and  His  disciples  lived  an  unencumbered  life.  He 
was  no  foe  of  private  property.  He  believed  in  it  and 
sanctioned  it.  But  He  never  allowed  Himself  to  be 
enslaved  to  it.  It  was  for  use  not  for  impediment. 
When  He  died  the  only  loot  for  His  murderers  was 
the  one  robe  that  He  wore.  One  secret  of  the  soldier's 
joy  and  fellowship  lay  in  this  freedom  from  the  trammels 
of  possessions  which  need  to  be  guarded  and  which  deflect 
action.  In  the  war  and  for  the  nation's  life  all  things 
were  held  common  and  valueless  except  as  they  were 
ministers  to  life  and  to  human  ends,  (c)  The  Cross 
represented  the  principle  of  Atonement.  Christ  suffered 
that  men  might  not  suffer.  He  met  the  anguish  of  separa- 
tion that  man  might  be  delivered  from  it.  "  In  my 
thinking,"  writes  a  thoughtful  Christian  lawyer,  '*  I  have 
felt  that  perhaps  the  most  succinct  statement  in  reply  to 
the  suggestion  that  it  is  inconsistent  for  those  who  are 
opposed  to  war  as  itself  an  evil,  yet  not  only  to  submit  to 
the  war,  but  enthusiastically  to  support  it,  is  to  point  out 
that  a  war  to  end  war  is  no  more  anomalous  than  is  the 
death  of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  to  end  death.  The  whole 
scheme,  as  I  interpret  it,  of  our  Christian  faith,  implies 
that.  The  sending  of  the  Son  of  God  to  earth  was,  in 
the  purpose  of  the  Father,  to  make  him  a  Saviour  and 
Lord;  to  destroy  the  enemies  of  man,  sin  and  death;  in 


44      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

the  accomplishment  of  that  purpose,  He  who  knew  no  sin 
was  made  sin  for  us,  and  He  who  was  the  conqueror  of 
death  died  for  us.  If  this  war  is  really  waged  as  a 
righteous  war,  it  has  in  it  all  the  elements,  not  of  a 
crusade  to  recover  an  empty  tomb,  but  of  a  sacrifice  unto 
death  to  break  the  bonds  of  human  enslavement,  and  with 
a  new  meaning  we  can  sing  the  old  stanza  of  the  Battle 
Hymn  of  the  Republic: 

" '  In  the  beauty  of  the  lilies  Christ  was  born  across  the  sea, 
With  a  glory  in  His  bosom  that  transfigures  you  and  me: 
As  He  died  to  make  men  holy,  let  us  die  to  make  men  free!  '  " 

Men  who  could  not  put  this  in  words  felt  it.  They 
knew  that  it  was  right  and  reasonable  to  die  to  diminish 
death,  to  suffer  pain  that  there  might  be  less  pain  to 
suffer,  to  accept  the  contradiction  and  separation  of  the 
grave  for  the  sake  of  the  affirmation  and  unity  of  life. 
Deeper  and  more  religious  meanings  than  we  have  ever 
proclaimed  are  discerned  in  the  Cross  of  Christ,  revealed 
and  illustrated  in  the  war. 

Prayer  is  another  of  the  Christian  realities  which  has 
been  unquestioningly  accepted.  All  the  theoretical  objec- 
tions to  prayer  which  have  grown  out  of  modern  inter- 
pretations of  the  universe  were  simply  ignored.  No  one 
needed  to  advance  an  apologetic  for  prayer.  Men  just 
prayed.  It  did  not  matter  whether  they  had  ever  prayed 
before  or  not.  They  did  it  now.  They  did  it  m  thou- 
sands of  homes  from  which  the  sons  had  gone  out  to  battle. 
They  did  it  in  the  aviation  bases  before  the  men  went  out 
to  peril  in  the  air.  They  did  it  on  the  war  ships  and 
the  transports  and  the  submarines.  They  did  it  in  the 
camps  at  home.     The  lads  who  had  known  how  were 


The  Effect  of  the  War  45 

sometimes  diffident  about  beginning  but  the  diffidence  dis- 
appeared and  men  who  had  not  known  how  came  under 
a  contagion  of  prayer  which  was  new  to  them  and  which 
with  many  seemed  so  natural  as,  in  the  moments  of  su- 
preme danger  at  least,  to  become  irresistible.  Henry  B. 
Wright  who  has  done  a  piece  of  work  at  Camp  Devens 
whose  results  will  be  enduring,  early  in  the  war  had  the 
following  experience:  ''Two  recruits  came  to  him  one 
night  with  the  request  that  he  give  them  a  little  advice. 

*  You  see,'  said  one  of  them,  *  we  don't  exactly  know 
what  to  do  about  praying.  Both  of  us  have  been  in  the 
habit  of  saying  a  short  prayer  at  home  every  night  before 
we  got  into  bed,  but  since  we  came  to  camp  we've  cut 
out  the  kneeling  and  said  them  after  we  were  safely 
between  the  blankets.  Do  you  think  this  is  all  right,  or 
ought  we  to  kneel,  as  we  always  have  done  since  we  were 
boys,  regardless  of  what  the  other  fellows  may  say  or 
think?'  Professor  Wright  hesitated  a  moment,  realizing 
that  the  situation  might  be  a  delicate  one.  He  didn't 
exactly  like  to  advise  them  to  kneel  and  perhaps  call 
down  the  ridicule  of  the  entire  barracks  upon  what  might 
easily  seem  to  some  to  be  a  flaunting  of  their  religion, 
but  on  the  other  hand  he  admits  that  he  was  anxious 
to  learn  what  the  result  of  such  a  course  would  be. 
'  That's  really  a  personal  problem  for  you  to  settle  for 
yourselves,'  he  finally  replied,  '  but  it  would  certainly  do 
no  great  harm  to  try  kneeling  once,  and  see  what  happens. 
If  the  result  is  satisfactory  you  can  keep  it  up.  If  it 
isn't,  why  go  back  to  saying  your  prayers  after  you  have 
gone  to  bed.'  The  young  men  thanked  him  and  departed. 
A  few  days  later  he  ran  into  one  of  them  on  the  street. 

*  Well,   how   did  you   come   out  ? '   was  his   first  query. 


46      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

'What  happened  when  you  knelt  the  other  night?' 
*  Nothing  at  all  —  nobody  made  a  sound,'  said  the  sol- 
dier, *  only  last  night  three  other  men  knelt  when  we 
did.'  *  And,'  said  Professor  Wright,  in  ending  the  story, 
'  if  you  will  believe  it,  at  the  present  moment  in  that  one 
barracks,  where  167  men  sleep,  every  one  with  the 
exception  of  about  a  dozen  kneel  regularly  at  night  and 
say  their  prayers.'  " 

And  at  the  front,  prayer  was  as  natural  to  men  as 
danger.  "  O  God,  give  me  courage.  Don't  let  me  flinch. 
Go  with  me  now.  Help  me,  O  God,  help  me.  Don't 
let  me  get  killed  if  it  can  be  so.  I  wish  I  were  home 
but  I  am  glad  I  am  here.  I  want  to  do  my  duty.  Help 
me  to  do  it.  Bring  me  back  safe.  But  help  me  to  do  my 
part.  And  if  this  is  my  end,  don't  let  me  drop.  Save  me, 
O  God,  and  keep  me.  Here  goes."  How  many  thousands 
made  such  prayers  in  those  last  moments  and  then  when 
the  shock  had  been  met  and  they  were  going  on,  or  lying 
still  waiting  for  help  to  come,  men  who  had  never  thought 
greatly  of  God  in  peace,  felt  that  He  was  there  and 
prayed  for  the  power  that  could  not  be  stopped  or  for  the 
patience  that  could  bear  all  pain  and  wait.  It  is  quite 
true  that  the  instinct  that  prays  in  danger  often  dies  down 
in  security.  But  even  so  it  has  borne  its  testimony.  The 
man  has  believed  and  there  can  be  no  disavowal  of  his 
belief. 

Above  all,  the  war  has  illumined  and  glorified  the 
figure  of  Christ.  A  good  many  persons  and  institutions 
and  ideas  have  been  discredited  by  the  war.  Philosophies 
which  jauntily  assumed  that  they  had  conquered  the  world 
are  a  laughing  stock  now.  But  Christ  towers  alike  over 
all  the  wreckage  and  all  the  glory  of  the  war.     Some 


The  Effect  of  the  War  47 

soldiers  thought  they  saw  Him  on  the  battlefield.  Others 
know  that  they  saw  Him  in  the  hospital.  The  one  prob- 
lem which  thousands  of  them  regarded  as  the  fundamen- 
tal problem  and  which  had  to  be  answered  for  them  was, 
**  Would  Christ  approve  of  this  war?"  And  the  death- 
less determination  which  came  to  them  arose  from  the 
conviction  that  Christ  did  approve.  They  came  to  see 
clearly,  also,  that  until  Christ  is  made  the  real  master 
of  human  life  there  can  be  no  assurance  that  it  will  not 
have  to  be  done  all  over  again.  Christ's  friendliness, 
His  superiority  to  race  prejudice.  His  unselfishness,  His 
righteousness.  His  forgiveness.  His  truth,  His  principles 
of  a  new  and  different  human  order,  they  realized,  are 
the  only  hope  of  the  new  world.  Men  have  discovered 
also  that  something  more  is  necessary  than  pronunciamen- 
toes,  programs  of  Utopia.  The  world  needs  a  Saviour, 
a  Redeemer,  a  Master,  a  Person  who  is  new  life  to  men 
and  nations,  who  can  say  the  words,  and  do  the  deeds 
which  only  Christ  can  say  and  do.  Mr.  E.  S.  Martin 
who  has  written  with  wisdom  and  earnestness  throughout 
the  war  bore  testimony  to  the  truth  in  his  Christmas  edi- 
torial in  Life: 

"  If  you  ask  who  was  the  greatest  mind  that  humanity  has 
produced,  most  people  hereabouts,  after  considering  whether 
it  was  Napoleon  or  Caesar  or  Lincoln  or  some  one  else,  will 
assent  if  you  suggest  to  them  that  it  was  Christ.  For  us  of 
European  descent,  at  least,  Christ  is  the  great  mind  that  is 
the  basis  of  the  civilization  that  we  live  in  and  practice  to 
improve.  The  life  and  teachings  of  Christ  conferred  new 
importance  on  the  individual,  and  in  that  way  they  are  the 
foundation  of  modern  democracy.  Christ  saw  in  every  man 
the  expectation,  or  at  least  the  possibility,  of  immortality,  and 
a    chance   to    attain    to   fitness   for    it.     To   Christ   no   one   was 


48      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

unimportant.  Rich  or  poor,  slave  or  free,  every  man  had  in 
him  the  germ  of  immortality  and  the  making  of  a  saint,  if 
only  the  spirit  of  him  could  be  caught  and  inspired.  What 
wisdom,  what  manner  of  conduct,  what  aspirations  would 
be  the  fruit  of  such  inspiration,  Christ  showed  by  His  own  life. 

"  Now  wars,  of  course,  do  not  make  people  Christlike  by 
wholesale.  They  do  diffuse  very  widely  a  certain  sort  of  con- 
secration. They  do  withdraw  people  from  selfish  concentra- 
tion on  their  own  prosperity  and  comfort  and  make  them 
spend  themselves  and  all  they  have  for  a  common  object. 
This  war  we  have  had  part  in  has  done  that  to  a  wonderful 
degree.  It  has  drawn  together  antagonistic  persons  and  peoples 
and  set  them  to  work  in  a  common  cause.  It  has  gone  won- 
derfully far  to  abolish  selfishness  for  the  time  being,  and  that 
has  been  a  Christian  result. 

"  But  what  we  may  reasonably  expect  of  wars  is  not  so  much 
the  immediate  Christianization  of  individuals,  as  the  bring- 
ing of  world  politics  into  better  accord  with  the  Great  Mind, 
so  that  the  kind  may  have  a  better  chance  to  enjoy  the  natural 
fruits  of  goodness,  and  the  greedy  may  be  hindered  from 
harrying  them.  When  a  war  has  increased  and  extended  the 
authority  of  the  Golden  Rule,  that  war  is  a  success.  .  .  . 

"  Extraordinary,  most  extraordinary,  are  the  changes  that 
have  been  accomplished  by  this  war.  Even  men  have  been 
changed  to  a  remarkable  degree.  Many  have  been  persuaded 
to  new  views,  and  millions  have  been  convinced  against  their 
will  by  weapons  that  they  devised  to  convince  others." 

The  war  has  swept  away  a  great  deal.  With  the  storm 
have  gone  some  of  the  fogs  with  which  men  had  hid  them- 
selves from  the  authority  and  the  necessity  of  Christ. 

I  venture  to  say  again,  accordingly,  what  was  said  at 
the  outset  of  this  chapter,  that  the  war  has  clarified  and 
confirmed  our  fundamental  religious  ideas  and  revealed 
the  power  of  their  appeal  to  the  present  day  mind.  The 
war  also  has  unmistakably  set  in  the  supreme  place  those 
moral  and  spiritual  principles  which  constitute  the  message 


The  Effect  of  the  War  49 

o-f  the  Church.  It  has  revealed  the  responsiveness  of 
men  to  the  essential  ethical  ideals  of  Christianity.  Chris- 
tianity proclaims  that  moral  and  spiritual  values  are  ab- 
solute and  dominant.  Much  of  our  modern  teaching  de- 
nied this.  The  war  has  affirmed  it.  It  has  shown  that 
these  values  are  supreme  over  personal  loss  and  material 
interest.  Fathers  and  mothers  have  given  up  their  only 
sons  to  die  for  a  cause.  Soldiers  have  served  in  the  war 
for  pay  so  small  as  to  be  negligible.  Thousands  of  men 
have  served  for  nothing.  More  than  that,  they  have  made 
untold  sacrifices.  In  the  case  of  Belgium  we  have  seen 
a  nation  give  up  its  material  interests  utterly  and  lay  the 
very  body  of  its  national  existence  upon  the  altar.  For 
four  years  it  was  a  national  soul  without  a  body  or  a 
home.  The  war  itself  in  its  essence  was  a  moral  not  a 
material  struggle  and  it  was  moral  ideas  which  prevailed. 
The  very  materialism  of  the  struggle  was  marked  by  the 
idealism  of  self  denial.  It  avowed  itself  as  nothing  but 
the  vehicle  and  weapon  of  a  righteous  purpose  and  a 
human  hope.  What  is  idealism  but  the  belief  in  the  pos- 
sibility of  the  best,  a  confidence  in  the  good  faith  of  all 
w^ho  love  liberty  and  are  ready  to  die  for  it,  the  brotherly 
trust  of  the  democratic  principle?  We  succeeded  in  the 
war  whenever  and  wherever  this  was  our  spirit  and  else- 
where and  always  we  failed  and  will  fail.  The  war  says 
that  what  Christ  said  is  forever  true. 

The  common  axiom  and  assumption  of  war  is  the  Chris- 
tian principle  that  life  is  not  the  great  value,  neither  the 
lives  of  others  nor  our  own.  "  Thou  shalt  not  kill  "  is 
not  the  whole  law  and  it  does  not  forbid  all  killing. 
The  very  code  in  which  the  law  is  found  prescribes  cap- 
ital punishment  and  sets  many  moral  values  over  human 


50      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

life.  It  may  even  be  a  good  thing  for  some  men  to  be 
killed.  Jesus  said  it  was  profitable  for  a  man  who  was 
about  to  offend  a  little  one  that  he  should  be  drowned 
first.  On  Jesus'  authority  one  may  believe  that  it  is  a 
kindness  to  a  villain  about  to  rape  a  child  to  kill  him  be- 
fore he  does  the  deed  of  desecration  and  shame,  if  he 
cannot  be  otherwise  deterred.  And  it  was  better  for 
Germany  to  have  her  soldiers  slaughtered  in  the  effort 
to  usurp  criminal  dominion  over  the  world  than  to  have 
spared  their  lives  and  allowed  her  to  succeed.  Nor  is  life 
the  first  value  to  its  owners.  The  commercial  theory  was 
fast  teaching  us  that  it  was,  that  men  and  nations  alike 
were  free  to  sacrifice  anything  else  rather  than  their  own 
lives.  The  war  preached  the  contrary  Christian  doc- 
trine, that  life  is  only  a  means,  not  an  end,  that  men  have 
a  right  to  lay  it  down.  The  scorn  of  the  crude,  familiar 
lines  written  long  before  the  war  is  an  accepted  scorn  to- 
day. 

"A  man  must  live!     We  justify 
Low  shift   and  trick  to  treason  high, 
A  little  vote  for  a  little  gold, 
To  a  whole  senate  bought  and  sold, 
With  this  self-evident  reply. 

"But  is  it  so?     Pray  tell  me  why 
Life  at  such  cost  you  have  to  buy? 
In  what  religion  were  you  told 

*  A  man  must  live'? 

"  There  are  times  when  a  man  must  die, 
Imagine  for  a  battle-cry 

From  soldiers  with  a  sword  to  hold  — 
From  soldiers  with  the  flag  unrolled  — 

*  A  man  must  live.'  " 


The  Effect  of  the  War  51 

Life  is  not  the  great  value.  Truth  and  loyalty  are 
above  life.  The  correct  estimate  of  the  value  and  use  of 
life  which  prevailed  in  the  war  ought  now  permanently 
to  stiffen  our  resistance  to  the  old  sophistries  which  justi- 
fied lies  to  save  life  and  to  clear  the  atmosphere  for  the 
doctrine  and  demand  of  Christianity  which  is  a  doctrine 
of  pure  veracity  and  a  demand  for  the  absolute  devotion 
of  life  to  enduring  sacrificial  service.  The  loyalty  of 
peace  also  ought  to  inherit  now  the  loyalty  awakened  and 
offered  in  war.  Loyalty  like  truth  is  above  life.  There 
are  times  when  men  have  truly  felt  that  even  loyalty 
to  loyalty,  though  the  object  to  which  that  loyalty  was 
attached  was  unreal  to  it,  was  worth  more  than  life. 
Sir  Alfred  Lyall's  poem,  "  Theology  in  Extremis  "  is  the 
tale  of  such  a  loyalty.  An  Englishman  taken  prisoner  in 
the  Indian  Mutiny  is  offered  life  if  he  will  abjure  Chris- 
tianity. He  does  not  believe  in  Christianity  and  he  has 
no  religious  faith  for  which  to  die.  A  word  which  he 
can  easily  speak  will  set  him  free. 

"  Only  a  formula  easy  to  patter, 
And,   God  Almighty,  what  can  it  matter?" 

The  memories  of  home  come  back  to  him  — 

"  Showing  me  summer  in  western  land 

Now,   as  the  cool  breeze  murmureth 
In  leaf  and  flower  —  And  here  I  stand 

In  this  plain  all  bare  save  the  shadow  of  death; 
Leaving  my  life  in  its  full  noonday. 
And  no  one  to  know  why  I  flung  it  away. 

"Why?     Am  I  bidding  for  glory's  roll? 
I  shall  be  murdered  and  clean  forgot; 
Is  it  a  bargain  to  save  my  soul? 

God,  whom  I  trust  in,  bargains  not; 


52      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

Yet  for  the  honor  of  English  race, 
May  I  not  live  or  endure  disgrace. 

"  Ay,  but  the  word,  if  I  could  have  said  it, 

I  by  no  terrors  of  hell  perplext; 

Hard  to  be  silent   and   have   no  credit 

From  man  in  this  world,  or  reward  in  the  next; 
None  to  bear  witness  and  reckon  the  cost 
Of  the  name  that  is  saved  by  the  life  that  is  lost. 

"  I  must  be  gone  to  the  crowd   untold 

Of  men  by  the  cause  which  they  served  unknown, 

Who  moulder  in  myriad  graves  of  old; 
Never   a  story  and  never   a   stone 

Tells   of   the   martyrs   who   died    like   me 

Just  for  the  pride  of  the  old  countree." 

If  for  this,  how  much  more  for  the  pride  and  the  love 
which  include  this?  '*  How  much  more?  Unlimitedly," 
answers  the  war.  "  Life  is  the  working  stuff  of  God. 
Men's  blood  is  the  stream  of  power  for  His  purpose." 

And  in  this  also  there  is  fresh  support  for  the  col- 
lective obligation  which  Christ  in  His  Church  lays  on 
men.  The  war  declared  the  primacy  of  the  corporate 
claim  of  society  over  the  right  of  individual  personality. 
The  constraint  of  the  body  is  upon  the  members.  What 
gives  the  flag  its  power  is  its  symbolization  of  this  col- 
lective life  and  its  claim.  The  sacredness  of  the  indi- 
vidual conscience  is  a  holy  thing  but  not  more  so  than 
the  sacredness  of  the  corporate  life.  Human  good  has  a 
right  to  ask  for  all  that  the  individual  has.  If  it  can 
demand  his  life,  it  can  demand  aught  else.  It  is  recog- 
nized that  he  can  refuse  it  and  no  unjust  penalty  must 
be  laid  upon  him  if  he  does.  Life  itself  will  judge  him 
and  he  will  know  the  full  mercy  and  the  full  righteous- 


The  Effect  of  the  War  53 

ness  of  God.  If  he  is  right  against  society's  false  claim 
upon  him,  life  and  God  will  justify  him  and  by  his  pain, 
if  need  be  by  his  death,  he  will  have  forwarded  the  prog- 
ress of  mankind  even  against  its  unseeing  will. 

The  central  act  of  Christianity  was  the  accepted  and 
unavoided  death  of  Christ.  He  had  a  right  to  lay  down 
His  life.  But,  more  than  that,  He  conceived  His  right 
to  be  His  duty.  The  duty  of  a  man  to  die  for  his  nation 
saves  the  principle  of  the  supremacy  of  collective  obliga- 
tion and  interest  from  any  endangerment  of  the  right  of 
the  individual  person.  The  good  man  like  the  Good 
Shepherd  lays  down  his  life  for  the  sheep,  whatever  the 
manner  or  occasion  of  the  dying.  We  have  seen  the 
glory  and  joy  of  the  happy  acceptance  of  this  duty.  The 
war  has  revealed  it  and  even  more  vividly  it  has  been 
revealed  in  those  accessory  services  which  have  glorified 
both  the  center  and  the  outskirts  of  the  great  conflict. 
There  has  been  no  more  shining  instance  than  the  life 
and  death  of  William  A.  Shedd  in  Western  Persia.  Dr. 
Shedd  was  the  senior  member  of  the  mission  station  of 
Urumia.  From  the  beginning  of  the  war  its  horrors 
fell  nowhere  more  darkly  and  fatally  than  upon  the 
Christian  population  of  northwestern  Persia.  They  were 
driven  first  northward  toward  Russia  and  then  southward 
into  Mesopotamia.  They  were  shut  up  in  Urumia  City 
in  crowded  mission  compounds.  Their  villages  were 
destroyed,  their  property  pillaged  and  their  daughters 
ravished.  One  can  hardly  wonder  that  when  power 
came  to  them  there  were  unwise  and  unjust  retaliations. 
Here  and  in  other  Persian  cities  the  typhus  and  typhoid 
cut  down  the  missionaries  remorselessly  as  they  cared 
for  the  persecuted  and  famine  stricken  people.     They  were 


54      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

free  to  come  away  and  save  their  lives  and  they  stayed 
and  laid  them  down.  Dr.  Shedd  had  been  called  on  by 
the  American  Government  to  act  as  vice-consul  and  for 
months  had  been  the  one  center  of  order  and  justice, 
restraining  wrong  doing,  whether  by  Moslem  or  by 
Christian,  relieving  suffering,  and  seeking  to  secure  the 
maintenance  of  at  least  some  form  of  nominal  govern- 
ment. At  last  panic-stricken,  against  his  persuasions  and 
appeal,  60,000  Assyrian  and  Armenian  Christians  set 
off  in  a  great  flight  from  Urumia  to  the  south.  Unable 
to  deter  them  Dr.  Shedd  resolved  to  accompany  them 
as  a  rearguard  of  protection  against  pursuing  Turks  and 
Kurds.  They  fled  without  food  or  transportation  over 
consecutive  ranges  of  mountains,  through  a  barren  coun- 
try without  grain  or  fuel  or  roads,  leaving  a  trail  of 
death  and  disease  behind  them.  Those  who  came  last 
died  by  thousands.  Dr.  Shedd  like  a  faithful  shepherd 
followed  his  flock  to  shield  and  protect  it  and  at  Sain 
Kala,  a  little  village,  south  of  the  Urumia  Lake,  he  fell  a 
victim  to  cholera.  It  had  been  open  to  him  and  his  asso- 
ciates at  any  time  to  leave  Persia  and  seek  safety,  but  like 
his  Master,  he  could  save  others  but  he  could  not  save 
himself.  One  may  justly  adapt  to  him  such  words  as 
Matthew  Arnold  used  of  his  father  in  "  Rugby  Chapel ": 

"But  thou  would'st  not  alone 
Be  saved,  our  brother,  alone 
Conquer  and  come  to  thy  goal, 
Leaving  the  rest   in  the  wild. 
They  were  weary,  and  they 
Fearful,   and   they   in   their  march 
Fain  to  drop  down  and  to  die. 
Still   thou   turnedst,    and   still 
Gavest  the  weary  thy  hand. 


The  Effect  of  the  War  55 

"  If,  in  the  paths  of  the  world, 
Stones  might  have  wounded  thy  feet, 
Toil  or  dejection  have  tried 
Thy  spirit,  of  that  they  saw 
Nothing  —  to  them  thou  wast  still 
Cheerful,  and  helpful,  and  firm! 
Therefore  to  thee  it  was  given 
Many  to  save  with  thyself; 
And,  at  the  end  of  the  day, 
O   faithful    shepherd!    to  come, 
Bringing  thy  sheep  in  thy  hand." 

There  are  still  other  lines  in  Arnold's  tribute  to  his 
father,  which  might  justly  be  applied  to  William  Shedd, 
true  missionary,  lover  of  Christ  and  of  men,  good  shep- 
herd like  his  Lord.  One  of  the  Syrian  people,  Professor 
Yohanan  of  Columbia  University,  who  knew  and  loved 
him,  has  himself  used  just  such  speech  of  him  and  of  his 
father:  "Dr.  Shedd,"  says  he,  "was  a  scholar,  and 
thoroughly  equipped  for  the  work  with  something  more 
than  the  surface-teaching  of  the  ordinary  theological  doc- 
trines. His  book,  '  Islam  and  the  Oriental  Churches,'  is 
an  able  piece  of  work.  He  laid,  however,  his  literary 
ambition  and  all  his  scientific  attainments  upon  the  altar 
of  God  from  whom  they  came,  counting  them  loss  for 
Christ.  .  .  .  He  did  not  work  for  stipend,  or  honor,  or 
the  praise  of  men,  but  was  impelled  by  higher  motives 
to  the  service  of  his  Master.  He  was  the  champion  of 
the  oppressed,  the  shepherd  of  a  gentle  and  humble  spirit, 
to  whom  the  poorest  of  his  flock  was  not  too  poor.  His 
greatest  joy  was  in  bringing  a  stray  sheep  into  the  fold." 

The  end  came  to  him  on  August  7,  19 18,  among  the 
mountains  of  Persian  Kurdistan.  Mrs.  Shedd  has  writ- 
ten from  Hamadan  an  epic  letter  of  the  closing  days : 


^6      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

"  The  roads  were  crowded  with  nearly  every  kind  of  animal 
that  walks  and  thousands  of  vehicles.  We  estimated  that 
there  were  about  70,000  Christians  in  Urumia,  or  perhaps 
more,  but  some  stayed  with  Moslem  friends,  and  some  did 
not  get  warning.  We  pushed  on  rapidly  and  got  along  fairly 
well  until  the  third  day  when  about  an  hour  from  Memetabad, 
in  Sulduz,  a  man  came  up  and  told  us  that  the  Turks  had 
reached  Heydarabad  an  hour  or  two  behind  us.  We  had  been 
hearing  firing  but  could  not  locate  it.  It  seemed  as  if  our  last 
hope  had  vanished  and  there  was  nothing  but  massacre  for 
the  thousands  of  frightened  people.  We  whipped  up  our  tired 
horses  to  try  and  reach  Memetyar  hoping  that  Dr.  Shedd  could 
find  the  prominent  men  there  and  get  them  to  intercede  for 
the  people.  Great  crowds  were  encamped  there.  The  report 
was  false.  The  Turks  were  not  behind  us  yet,  but  there  had 
been  an  attack  at  Heydarabad  and  the  people  left  there  and 
ran  off  leaving  their  loads  and  their  money.  But  we  did  not 
dare  to  stay  at  Memetyar  over  night  and  hastened  on.  Later, 
those  coming  after  us  were  fired  upon  by  cannon  on  that  road, 
and  again  they  ran  off  leaving  their  loads  which  was  evidently 
what  the  attackers  wanted. 

**  On  the  fifth  day  we  reached  Mianduab,  distress  increasing 
day  by  day.  The  Van  Armenians  with  most  of  the  mountain 
tribes,  including  nearly  all  the  fighters,  were  ahead,  so  that 
those  of  us  in  the  rear  were  almost  unprotected.  On  the  fifth 
day  we  heard  that  the  English  were  really  at  Sain  Kala  so 
we  took  heart  and  camped  that  night  in  a  garden  with  a  few 
others  at  Kara  Waran.  The  next  morning  we  took  our  time 
thinking  that  since  the  English  were  near  we  would  be  safe. 
About  six  o'clock  firing  began.  It  was  evident  we  were  being 
attacked  from  the  rear.  Dr.  Shedd  jumped  on  a  horse  and 
tried  to  rally  the  few  gun  men  left.  We  found  that  nearly  every- 
body had  moved  on  and  we  were  in  the  extreme  rear. 

"  With  great  difficulty  we  got  our  wagons  through  the  narrow 
streets  of  the  village  and  on  to  the  main  road  by  a  short  cut 
for  the  firing  was  going  on  behind  us  and  we  did  not  dare 
to  go  around.  Then  fighting  began  on  our  front  and  from  the 
right.  After  some  driving  we  found  ourselves  at  the  tail  end 
of  the  crowd  which  was  jammed  in  between  two  walls  where 


The  Effect  of  the  War  57 

we  had  to  stay  for  some  time.  The  fighting  in  the  rear  was 
stopped  and  I  was  greatly  relieved  to  have  Dr.  Shedd  appear. 
One  of  our  attacks  was  from  the  Majd  i  Saltana  who  had 
small  cannon.  Our  leader  claimed  to  have  taken  one  and 
showed  us  the  shell.  The  attacks  were  repulsed  sufficiently  to 
allow  the  crowd  to  move  forward,  but  the  fighting  kept  up 
three  or  four  hours  as  we  traveled  on.  We  ourselves  were 
not  in  the  place  where  the  bullets  were  thickest.  We  saw 
several  dead  bodies,  mostlj'  women. 

"Again  in  the  aftciuoon  we  were  attacked,  but  one  of  the 
Syrian  leaders  with  his  men  who  had  been  sent  back  reached 
us  in  time,  and  he  soon  got  possession  of  the  mountain  ridges 
and  protected  the  long  line  of  refugees.  This  time  too,  Dr.  Shedd 
got  on  a  horse  and  tried  to  rally  the  men  with  guns  to  protect 
the  crowds  so  that  by  night  he  was  very  tired. 

"  That  night  we  stopped  at  a  threshing  floor  a  few  hours 
from  Sain  Kala,  and  made  an  early  start  reaching  the  English 
camp  at  Sain  Kala  about  9  A.  m.  August  6th.  Thousands  and 
'thousands,  perhaps  fifty  thousand  (I  can't  say)  refugees  were 
camped  about  Sain  Kala,  in  the  orchards,  yards  of  houses,  and 
spread  out  over  the  surrounding  hills.  And  still  the  long  line 
of  stragglers  reached  back  for  miles. 

"  From  Urumia  to  Sain  Kala,  six  days'  journey  for  us,  I  saw 
perhaps  not  more  than  20  bodies  of  Moslems  lying  along  the 
road,  evidently  shot  by  the  Armenians  or  Mountain  Syrians 
who  were  leading  the  flight.  At  nearly  every  village  we  had 
the  same  complaint  of  plunder  and  murder  by  those  in  advance, 
so  those  of  us  in  the  rear  suffered  the  penalty.  Villages  nearly 
everywhere  were  deserted.  We  could  buy  nothing  and  were 
always  in  danger  of  attack. 

"  When  we  reached  the  English  camp  at  Sain  Kala,  August 
6th,  we  were  received  by  Major  Moore  and  Captain  Reed,  the 
latter  for  many  years  connected  whh  the  English  Mission  in 
Urumia.  They  had  been  sent  with  ammunition,  Lewis  guns, 
money  and  a  handful  of  men,  to  save  the  Urumia  situation, 
but  came  '  too  late,  too  late.'  Dr.  Shedd  had  longed  for  months 
to  be  able  to  shift  some  of  his  heavy  responsibilities  and  he 
was  wonderfully  cheered  when  we  reached  Sain  Kala,  thinking 
now  that  the  people  would  be  safe  and  there  would  be  some 


58      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

authority  that  could  maintain  order.  Ever  since  the  middle 
of  February  he  had  been  giving  himself  without  reserve,  try- 
ing to  save  life  and  property  in  the  midst  of  anarchy,  but 
that  is  a  long  story.  We  had  hardly  been  in  camp  at  Sain 
Kala  an  hour  before  all  hopes  of  rest  vanished. 

"  A  small  force  of  Englishmen  sent  out  about  16  or  18  miles 
to  protect  refugees  in  the  rear  had  been  attacked  by  a  larger 
force.  Immediately  the  camp  was  astir,  and  a  body  of  cavalry 
was  sent  out.  There  were  only  about  150  fighting  men  in  the 
English  detachment  at  Sain  Kala,  but  they  had  rapid  firing 
guns  which  saved  them  more  than  once.  They  tried  to  get 
Syrian  and  Armenian  leaders  to  get  their  men  out  but  it  was 
very  difficult  as  they  were  with  their  families  and  a  terrible 
panic  had  begun.  The  thousands  camped  around  us  started 
to  move  forward  slowly,  irresistibly,  like  a  great  avalanche. 
Some  armed  men  were  sent  back  to  the  town  of  Mahmudjik 
to  rescue  the  people  there  and  help  the  struggling  rear  of 
the  line  of  refugees  which  had  been  cut  off.  I  am  told  that 
quite  a  number  on  both  sides  were  killed  in  Mahmudjik,  the 
Moslems  attacking  from  roofs  and  windows.  They  had  great 
provocations  for  as  usual  they  had  been  robbed,  but  the  attack 
was  repulsed,  all  the  refugees  moved  forward  and  by  evening 
only  the  English  camp  remained. 

"  An  hour  or  so  after  reaching  camp  I  noticed  that  Dr.  Shedd 
did  not  look  well.  Soon  he  complained  of  the  great  heat  in 
the  tent.  I  told  him  I  would  fix  him  a  place  to  lie  down  in 
our  Red  Cross  cart  which  had  a  canvas  cover,  where  it  was 
cooler.  After  a  time  I  saw  he  was  very  weak  and  miserable  so 
I  had  the  baggage  taken  out  and  arranged  a  bed  for  him  with 
quilt  and  pillows  on  the  floor  of  the  cart.  The  English  doctor 
was  out  with  the  cavalry.  Dr.  Jesse  Yonan  was  there  but  had 
no  medicine.  I  feared  cholera  and  suggested  calomel  which 
I  had.     We  gave  him  several  doses  of  that. 

*'  About  four  or  five  o'clock  Captain  Reed  told  me  they  were 
going  to  move  their  camp  to  a  place  under  the  shelter  of  the 
mountains.  I  made  arrangements  for  our  baggage  and  we 
started  before  dark  so  that  we  could  see  the  road  and  Dr. 
Shedd  would  not  be  jolted  so  much.  The  three  or  four  Syrians 
besides  our  two  drivers  were  with  us  and  I  thought  they  under- 


The  Effect  of  the  War  59 

stood  perfectly  well  that  we  wanted  to  stop  at  the  English 
camp  where  we  would  see  the  English  doctor.  It  soon  grew 
dark  and  I  was  entirely  absorbed  in  my  care  for  Dr.  Shedd  and 
did  not  watch  the  road.  After  what  seemed  like  hours,  I 
noticed  that  the  riders  behind  were  leaving  us,  and  I  called 
out  and  asked  if  we  were  not  near  the  English  camp.  They 
replied  we  had  left  it  several  miles  behind.  I  cannot  tell  you 
my  feelings;  the  roads  were  too  rough  and  uncertain  to  return. 
We  got  into  a  gully  and  could  not  go  on.     It  was  very  dark. 

"  We  called  to  the  riders  who  were  leaving  us  to  come 
back  and  help  us  back  the  cart  up  to  the  level,  but  they  went 
on.  However,  the  men  who  were  with  us  succeeded  in  backing 
the  cart  up  to  a  level  place  where  we  decided  to  stay  until 
morning.  Then  we  were  alone  on  that  desolate  mountain  road 
in  the  darkness  with  my  husband  dying  and  no  medicine,  no 
nourishment,  no  comfortable  place  for  him  to  lie,  and  only  a 
limited  supply  of  water.  I  lighted  the  lantern  and  looked  at 
his  face,  saw  he  was  very  bad  and  told  the  men  some  one 
must  go  back  for  the  English  doctor.  Two  of  them  went,  but 
the  doctor  did  not  reach  us  until  midnight.  There  was  an 
old  cart  left  by  the  roadside  and  the  men  set  fire  to  it  to  have 
heat  and  light.  The  lantern  had  only  a  few  drops  of  oil  so 
we  could  not  keep  it  lighted.  I  had  some  coffee  which  the 
men  made  and  Dr.  Shedd  drank  it  eagerly.  He  was  very  weak 
but  we  had  no  nourishment  to  give  him.  From  the  first  he 
had  severe  cramps  in  his  legs  and  was  very  cold.  I  heated 
the  water  bottle  for  his  feet.  The  doctor  came  and  suggested 
ptomaine  poison  and  left  us  saying  we  should  wait  till  they 
came  up  in  the  morning.  Dr.  Shedd  was  not  conscious  after 
that.  A  little  after  light  the  man  said  we  could  not  wait 
there  as  there  was  firing  behind  and  the  English  were  probably 
attacked,  so  we  took  him  in  his  dying  hour  over  those  rough 
mountain  roads,  two  hours  or  more,  when  Captain  Reed  and 
the  doctor  caught  up  with  us.  We  drove  the  cart  to  the  side 
of  the  road.  The  doctor  pronounced  it  cholera  and  at  my  re- 
quest gave  him  a  small  injection  for  I  still  hoped  that  God 
might  let  him  stay.  In  a  few  minutes  he  breathed  his  last 
about  10  A.M.,  August  7th,  just  one  week  after  leaving  Urumia. 
Captain  Reed  said  we  had  better  go  on   as  far  as  the  carts 


6o      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

could  go  and  find  a  burial  place.  We  went  on  for  an  hour 
or  so  and  found  a  place  on  the  mountain  side  near  a  rock. 
There  was  nothing  to  dig  with  but  a  small  adz.  But  with  the 
aid  of  fingers  and  sticks  they  made  a  shallow  grave  quite 
a  distance  above  the  road.  We  sewed  him  in  a  blanket  and 
then  wrapped  him  in  a  heavy  canvas  from  the  cart  and  bound 
it  with  ropes.  Dr.  Yonan  read  a  part  of  i  Corinthians  xv 
and  led  in  prayer.  After  a  layer  of  earth  we  placed  stones 
and  again  on  the  top  and  then  smoothed  it  over  so  that  no 
enemy  might  know  where  the  grave  was.  We  cut  a  cross 
on  the  top  of  the  rock  and  on  the  front,  and  Captain  Reed 
had  a  drawing  made  of  the  place  so  that  it  can  be  found.  It 
is  about  six  or  seven  miles  west  of  Sain  Kala.  It  was  terrible 
to  leave  him  there  in  that  wild  desolate  place  but  I  hope  to 
take  him  to  Seir  some  time." 

This  is  what  life  is  given  for,  that  men  may  lay  it 
down  for  their  fellow  men.  The  awful  sacrifices  of  the 
war  sanction  and  support  the  call  of  Christ  for  men's 
lives  now  in  peace. 

For  the  setting  of  duty  and  truth  and  glory  above  life 
does  not  mean  always  that  we  are  to  die  for  them.  More 
often  it  means  that  we  are  not  to  die  at  all  but  to  do 
the  harder  thing  and  live  for  them.  That  will  be  our 
problem  and  our  testing  now.  It  is  easy  to  draw  mis- 
leading inferences  from  the  war  analogies.  We  think 
that  because  war  beheld  such  unity  of  national  purposes 
and  readiness  of  national  sacrifice  we  shall  now  see  the 
same  in  peace.  War  has  always  been  able  to  draw  out 
what  peace  commands  in  vain.  War  is  a  transient  in- 
terest. Peace  is  an  unending  task.  War  appeals  to  all 
that  is  worst  in  men  as  well  as  to  all  that  is  best.  Peace 
can  only  call  upon  the  highest  and  truest  self.  War 
can  use  the  unifying  energy  of  a  common  hate.  Peace 
knows  that  it  is  the  hater  who  is  hurt  by  his  own  hate. 


The  Efect  of  the  War  6i 

What  war  brought  forth  had  its  splendor.  One  can 
understand  what  the  British  officer  meant,  of  whom  Mr. 
Masefield  spoke,  who  wrote,  "  I  do  not  know  what  I  will 
do  when  this  lovely  war  is  over."  It  had  its  glories  and 
they  are  gone.  But  if  that  which  passes  away,  as  Paul 
said,  is  glorious,  how  much  more  glorious  is  that  which 
remains.  And  what  remains?  The  great  religious  con- 
victions and  moral  ideals  of  which  we  have  been  speaking, 
remain.  The  need  of  loyalty  and  devotion  and  sacrifice 
remains.  The  task  and  summons,  and  the  test  and  en- 
treaty of  peace  remain.  Can  men  meet  these  as  they 
met  the  challenge  of  death?  Can  the  man  do  this  harder 
thing? 

"  So  he  died  for  his  faith.     That  is  fine  — 

More  than  most  of  us  can  do, 
But,  say,  can  you  add  to  that  line 

That  he  lived  for  it,  too? 

"  In  his  death  he  bore  witness  at  last 

As  a  martyr  to  truth. 
Did  his  life  do  the  same  In  the  past 

From  the  days  of  his  youth? 

"  It  is  easy  to  die.     Men  have  died 

For  a  wish  or  a  whim  — 
From  bravado  or  passion  or  pride. 

Was  it  harder  for  him? 

"  But  to  live  —  every  day  to  live  out 

All  the  truth  that  he  dreamt. 
While  his  friends  met  his  conduct  with  doubt 

And  the  world  with  contempt. 

"  Was  it  thus  that  he  plodded  ahead, 

Never  turning  aside? 
Then  we'll  talk  of  the  life  that  he  led, 

Never  mind  how  he  died." 


62      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

The  war  has  borne  its  testimony  to  the  truth  of 
Christianity  and  to  the  vahdity  of  its  ethical  ideals.  And 
now  the  war  is  over  and  gone.  But  the  testimony  is 
still  here  to  be  used  by  the  Church  as  it  seeks  to  lead 
men  to  achieve  the  manhood  and  to  render  the  service 
which  shone  with  so  bright  a  glory  in  the  war  and  which 
are  needed  not  less  but  more  by  the  nation  and  by  mankind 
in  the  long  days  of  peace. 


IV 

THE  DUTY   OF  A   LARGER   CHRISTIAN   COOPERATION 

The  war  has  been  in  its  noblest  aspects  an  education 
of  the  world  in  some  of  the  fundamental  Christian  prin- 
ciples. It  has  also  been  for  the  Church  an  extraordinary 
educational  discipline.  The  Church  has  learned  from 
its  own  experience  what  a  penetrating  and  relentless 
teacher  war  is.  War  tests  persons  and  ideals  and  insti- 
tutions in  ways  in  which  they  have  never  been  tested 
before.  It  reveals.  It  rejects.  It  demands.  And  there 
never  was  a  war  that  did  these  things  so  penetratingly 
and  relentlessly  as  the  war  which  has  now  come  to  its 
end.  We  shall  be  examining  the  lessons  of  this  war,  and 
the  experiences  it  has  brought  to  us  all  the  rest  of  our 
days,  and  men  will  be  pondering  them  for  many  genera- 
tions yet  to  come.  There  is  not  a  department  of  our 
national  life  that  will  not  show  the  effects  of  this  experi- 
ence. Our  theology,  our  education,  our  politics,  our 
social  ethics,  everything  that  is  related  to  our  life  in 
any  way  will  bear  the  impress  of  what  we  have  been 
through. 

I  wish  to  single  out  here  one  aspect  of  the  Church's 
experience  —  namely  the  lessons  that  have  come  through 
the  Church's  work  in  the  war,  that  bear  on  the  prin- 
ciple of  interdenominational  cooperation,  its  spirit,  its 
limitations,  and  its  possibilities.     That  is  not  the  only  one 

63 


64      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

of  the  problems  we  face  to-day.  For  there  is  first  of 
all  the  spiritual  problem  and  the  lessons  of  the  war 
relating  to  that.  That  is  the  fundamental  problem  of  all. 
It  is  not  the  question  of  whether  we  can  think  out  some 
new  coordination  and  rearranging  of  activities  and  rela- 
tionships, but,  are  the  dynamics  here?  Are  the  energy 
and  the  power  now  available  which  are  adequate  to  do 
the  work  of  to-day?  We  can  think  of  many  possible 
manipulations  and  adjustments.  They  will  get  us  no- 
where unless  God's  men  are  now  here,  and  God's  power 
is  in  these  men  to  do  the  work  that  waits  to  be  done  in 
this  hour.  One  thinks  back  to  the  days  after  the  Civil 
War.  In  many  ways  we  are  immeasurably  in  advance 
of  those  days.  We  shall  not  see  in  our  time  anything 
like  the  political  corruption  that  followed  the  Civil  War. 
Our  civic  life  is  projected  on  an  entirely  different  level 
to-day.  We  have  great  moral  forces  beating  through 
the  nation  now,  vastly  more  powerful  and  beneficent 
than  those  the  nation  knew  at  the  end  of  the  Civil  War. 
But  one  asks  one's  self  again  and  again  other  questions. 
It  seems  to  me  one  hears  them  wherever  he  goes. 
"Moody,  where  are  you?  Where  is  Moody?"  One 
thinks  he  hears  that  voice  coming  out  of  the  sky  and  from 
the  problems  on  every  hand.  Where  is  he,  the  man  of  his 
faith,  the  man  of  his  masterful  power,  of  his  creative 
leadership?  Have  we  got  such  men  here  to-day?  That 
is  our  first  problem,  and  it  would  be  well  worth  our 
while  to  spend  thought  on  that  problem. 

Then  there  are  problems  of  constitution  and  relationship 
which  ought  to  be  studied  regarding  every  institution  by 
itself  and  which  inevitably  are  raised  about  institutions 
by  others  without  and  yet  related  to  them.     We  have 


The  Duty  of  Cooperation  65 

seen  with  joy  one  reaction  of  this  sort  among  the  great 
Lutheran  bodies  of  this  land,  the  war  having  undoubtedly 
advanced  measures  already  under  way  looking  toward  the 
consolidation  of  three  great  Lutheran  agencies  into  one 
of  the  most  powerful  and  promising  forces  in  America. 

It  is  not  of  these  things  that  I  wish  to  speak  here  but 
of  what  we  have  learned  concerning  the  question  of  inter- 
denominational cooperation,  looked  at  from  the  angle, 
not  of  our  present  spiritual  problem,  although  that  is 
involved,  nor  from  the  angle  of  constitutional  function 
and  relationship,  but  from  the  plain  point  of  view  of 
activities  and  personal  relationships  and  interdenomi- 
national policy.  I  wish  to  speak  of  five  great  lessons 
which  I  believe  the  experience  of  the  war  has  taught  us 
in  regard  to  the  problem  viewed  in  this  light.  They 
are  not  new  lessons  but  they  have  been  newly  brought 
home  to  us. 

L  First  of  all,  we  have  been  taught  clearly  the  absolute 
indispensableness  of  an  adequate  unselfish  instrumentality 
for  cooperation,  in  the  name  of  the  Church  and  with 
the  consciousness  of  the  Church  in  its  richest  historic  and 
spiritual  significance.  I  have  chosen  all  these  words  care- 
fully. Let  us  eliminate  the  word  unselfish  for  the  mo- 
ment. I  will  return  to  it  later.  Let  us  first  concentrate 
our  thought  on  what  the  year  has  shown  us  concerning 
the  absolute  indispensableness  of  an  adequate  instrumen- 
tality for  cooperation  in  the  name  of  the  Church,  and 
with  the  richest  Church  consciousness.  The  year  has 
taught  us  that  lesson  beyond  all  cavil  or  question.  It 
has  shown  us  that  there  are  ways  in  which  we  are  abso- 
lutely necessary  one  to  another,  that  we  need  one  an- 
other's encouragement   and   inspiration   and   faith.     One 


66     The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

body  will  have  a  vision  that  has  been  hidden  from  an- 
other body  which  was  meant  to  get  it  from  this  body. 
This  man  in  one  communion  will  see  an  obligation  clearly. 
It  is  meant  of  God  that  other  communions  should  catch 
the  vision  from  him.  There  are  men  to-day  who  can  tes- 
tify to  the  vision  that  came  to  their  communion  last  year 
through  the  encouragement,  through  the  challenge,  may 
be  through  the  spiritual  rebuke  they  received  as 
they  compared  what  they  were  attempting  to  do  with 
what  other  bodies  were  planning.  We  need  our  mutual 
faith  and  encouragement  that  both  our  collective  and 
our  individual  purpose  may  be  what  otherwise  it  could 
not  be.  We  have  discovered  also  that  cooperation  is 
necessary  to  protect  ourselves  from  one  another's  mis- 
takes. No  communion  by  withdrawing  itself  can  escape 
the  consequences  of  the  mistakes  of  others.  It  will  simply 
sacrifice  the  great  gains  that  would  accrue  from  coopera- 
tion. It  will  not  relieve  itself  from  any  of  the  hardships 
and  difficulties  that  come  from  errors  made  anywhere  in 
the  field  of  Christian  action.  We  realized  during  the 
war  that  for  simple  self-protection  it  was  necessary  for 
all  the  Christian  bodies  working  in  the  war  problem 
to  work  closely  together.  We  see  now  that  churches 
can  reject  the  benefits  of  cooperation  but  they  can  not 
escape  the  penalties  of  separation.  In  the  third  place 
we  were  driven  to  cooperation  because  the  nation 
had  been  forced  to  unite.  It  would  have  been  an  intol- 
erable thing  if  Christian  elements  in  the  nation,  bodies 
that  had  everything  in  common,  a  bond  of  unity  more 
deep  than  anything  else  on  earth,  in  spite  of  all  that 
may  divide,  could  not  work  together.  Also  the  churches 
realized  from  the  beginning  that  we  had  a  task  bigger 


The  Duty  of  Cooperation  '67 

than  all  of  us  together  could  do  and  parts  of  which 
were  indivisible.  I  mean  that  there  were  sections  of 
the  task  that  could  not  be  denominationalized.  There 
were  duties  which  had  to  be  done  that  could  not  be 
taken  up  by  anybody  in  isolation.  They  had  to  be  dealt 
with  by  all.  It  would  be  an  easy  thing  to  multiply 
these  grounds  of  evidence  of  the  indispensableness  of  an 
adequate  instrumentality  of  interdenominational  coopera- 
tion. 

All  of  these  reasons  still  remain.  We  still  need 
mutual  encouragement  and  help  as  we  face  the  tasks  of 
peace.  The  tasks  of  peace  are  vastly  more  intricate  and 
difficult  than  the  tasks  of  war.  Whatever  necessity  there 
was  during  the  time  of  war  that  we  should  help  one 
another  by  the  measure  of  our  discernment  of  duty, 
that  we  should  bring  to  one  another  the  support  of  our 
mutual  faith,  we  have  to-day  under  much  more  trying 
and  exacting  circumstances  than  in  the  days  of  the  war. 
We  have  to  protect  ourselves  to-day  against  one  an- 
other's mistakes  and  we  will  have  to  do  it  more  and 
more  as  the  days  go  by.  Anybody  who  tries  to  draw 
himself  off  will  not  escape  the  sure  penalty  that  is  going 
to  follow  the  blunders  any  of  us  may  make.  In  spite 
of  the  dissolution  of  the  unity  of  war  the  nation  will 
pull  itself  together  again  before  its  tasks  of  peace.  New 
communities  of  interest  are  growing  up  in  our  national 
life.  These  unities  must  not  be  allowed  to  rebuke  us. 
Whatever  pressure  there  was  upon  the  Church  in  the 
days  of  war  to  lead  the  nation  and  the  world  into  a 
large  and  deeper  unity,  that  pressure  is  on  us  still.  The 
tasks  we  face  now  are  greater  than  the  war  tasks.  You 
can  exchange  every  task  we  had  to  face  in  war  with  a 


68      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

greater  task  still  that  we  must  face  In  peace,  and  with 
the  added  duty  of  supplying  now  resources  of  moral  unity 
other  than  war  with  its  mechanical  pressure  of  outward 
danger  to  the  life  of  the  nation  can  provide.  We  have 
learned  afresh  through  the  experience  of  the  war  the 
indispensableness  of  an  adequate  continuing  agency  of 
interdenominational  cooperation  in  the  name  of  the  Church 
and  with  the  richest  consciousness  of  all  that  the  Church 
historically  and  spiritually  stands  for  in  our  deepest  life. 
We  have  seen  also  that  cooperation  must  Include  three 
things.  It  must  Include  obviously  the  coordination  of 
the  forces  which  aim  at  common  ends  and  of  programs 
which  cover  common  ground.  Whatever  cooperation  we 
have,  whatever  Instrumentality  of  cooperation,  must  secure 
this  first  of  all.  It  must  bring  together  forces  that  will 
be  more  in  their  aggregate  than  the  total  of  these  forces 
added  together  separately.  The  principle  of  unity  itself 
increases  the  sum  of  the  units.  It  must  bring  together 
programs  in  the  making  rather  than  In  the  days  of  hard- 
ened completion.  Secondly  It  must  provide  full  inter- 
change of  knowledge  and  purpose.  It  must  secure  full 
liaison  among  the  Christian  forces.  That  is  a  word 
that  the  war  has  brought  Into  a  new  significance,  an  old 
and  sinister  word  to  which  the  war  has  given  a  new 
and  abiding  meaning.  It  was  the  essential  condition  of 
efficiency  In  every  department  of  our  national  and  inter- 
national experience  these  last  three  years.  You  can  write 
the  history  of  these  years  In  the  effort  of  men  to  achieve 
this  kind  of  correlation,  the  Interchange  of  knowledge, 
of  plan  and  of  sympathetic  purpose.  The  churches 
made  some  progress  In  this  matter  during  the  war.  We 
may  thank  God  for  the  friendships  that  had  been  pre- 


The  Duty  of  Cooperation  69 

pared  against  this  hour  between  men  who  stood  in  places 
of  responsibility  in  the  denominational  and  interdenomi- 
national services  of  the  war  time,  between  whom  there 
were  relationships  of  a  generation  of  understanding  and 
love  so  that  it  was  possible  to  maintain  by  personal 
relationships  an  interchange  of  knowledge,  plan,  and  pur- 
pose, without  which  problems  would  have  arisen  the  grav- 
ity of  which  can  hardly  be  exaggerated.  We  must  delib- 
erately plan  permanently  for  this  liaison  in  the  future.  I 
do  not  know  how  this  can  be  done,  whether  by  some  coor- 
dinating committee  of  men  who  know  and  absolutely  trust 
one  another,  who  can  throw  strands  across  the  chasms 
that  divide  these  great  moving  activities  of  our  day  and 
keep  them  in  constant  personal  touch  one  with  another 
or  in  some  other  way.  It  is  not  altogether  a  matter  of 
trust.  In  part  it  is  simply  a  matter  of  magnitudes.  No 
one  man  is  in  position  to  keep  in  touch  with  all  that  is 
going  on.  We  must  secure  either  in  existing  agencies  or 
by  some  new  piece  of  machinery  a  correlation  of  knowl- 
edge and  plan  between  the  different  denominations  and  the 
interdenominational  agencies  which  will  meet  this  second 
need  in  an  adequate  instrumentality  of  cooperation.  I 
say  we  must  have  an  instrumentality  of  cooperation  which 
will  provide  first  for  a  coordination  of  interpenetrating 
forces  and  overlapping  programs;  in  the  second  place  for 
an  interchange  of  intelligence,  for  a  complete  and  trusted 
liaison  between  the  agencies  operating  in  these  fields, 
and  in  the  third  place  which  will  supply  a  wise,  collec- 
tive guidance.  We  need  a  collective  guidance.  No  one 
of  us  has  wisdom  enough  to  handle  his  own  duty  alone. 
There  are  problems  rooted  in  all  the  fiber  of  humanity 
that  cannot  be  dealt  with  by  segments  of  humanity  or 


70     The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

of  the  Church.  We  must  think  out  a  method  of  wise, 
capable  and  trusted  leadership  that  will  supply  the  collec- 
tive wisdom  we  need  to  confront  the  problems  of  this 
day. 

All  this  has  been  a  great  gain.  It  never  can  be  an 
open  question  again  as  to  whether  the  Federal  Council 
of  the  Churches  of  Christ  or  something  that  fills  that 
ground  is  an  absolutely  indispensable  necessity.  It  is 
settled  once  and  for  ever  by  the  experience  through 
which  we  went  in  the  war  that  we  must  have  an  agency 
of  denominational  cooperation  that  will  be  adequate  to 
supply  these  needs  of  which  I  have  been  speaking. 

II.  In  the  second  place  the  experience  of  the  war  has 
thrown  a  great  deal  of  light  on  the  principles  and  prob- 
lems of  this  interdenominational  service  and  coordination 
which  is  necessary.  It  has  shown  us  how  we  need  it  for 
the  ends  to  which  I  have  just  referred.  It  has  shown 
us  also  how  it  can  be  secured,  and  that  it  is  not  by  re- 
adjustments of  constitutional  relationships  nor  by  deter- 
mination of  theoretical  allotments  of  power  and  authority. 
These  have  their  place.  But  this  problem  which  the 
churches  are  facing  now  is  a  problem  of  service  and  per- 
sonal relationship  and  cooperative  adjustment,  and  we 
will  get  off  on  false  quests  if  we  follow  the  other  lines. 
If  we  solve  the  problems  of  service  and  friendship  the 
other  problems  will  work  themselves  out  wisely,  and  in 
order  that  that  may  be  done,  may  I  bring  out  that  word 
unselfish  already  spoken  of.  It  is  evident  that  the  only 
kind  of  instrumentality  that  will  adequately  meet  this 
need  and  fill  this  field  must  be  one  that  is  marked  by 
institutional  disinterestedness.  One  recalls  the  three  qual- 
ifications of  leadership  of  which  Emerson  speaks  in  his 


The  Duty  of  Cooperation  71 

essay  on  Courage, —  first,  disinterestedness,  second,  prac- 
tical power,  and  third,  courage.  These  are  the  three 
qualifications  of  leadership  in  individual  men  and  they  are 
the  qualifications  of  leadership  in  movements  and  insti- 
tutions as  wtW.  Let  anybody  have  the  credit.  The 
important  thing  is  that  any  agency  that  sets  out  to  do 
Vfoxk  for  the  churches  should  lose  its  life  in  the  doing  of 
it.  It  should  seek  no  honor  whatever  of  its  own.  Some 
of  our  problems  spring  from  our  forgetting  that.  Let 
honor  be  given  where  honor  is  due.  It  is  no  sign  of 
strength  or  efficiency  to  seek  to  monopolize  glory.  "  In 
honor  preferring  one  another."  We  remember  what 
comes  next!  There  is  no  intimation  whatever  that  this 
honoring  recognition  of  others  impairs  one's  efficiency  in 
his  own  task.  ''  In  honor  preferring  one  another,  not 
slothful  in  business."  They  go  together  inevitably. 
They  go  together  in  personal  leadership.  I  am  not 
speaking  now  of  that.  Thank  God  that  there  is  so  much 
disinterested  personal  service.  But  they  go  together  in 
institutional  leadership. 

We  have  learned  through  the  war  one  other  thing, 
namely,  that  the  churches  must  frankly  face  and  solve  the 
problem  of  supplying  among  themselves  a  leadership  that 
is  neither  too  strong  nor  too  weak.  You  can  not  have 
a  leadership  that  is  too  strong  and  that  breaks  away 
from  its  following  or  coerces  it,  nor  too  weak  to  fill 
Emerson's  third  requirement  of  leadership,  that  there 
must  be  courage  in  it. 

Now  these  are  not  easy  things  to  bring  about.  They 
are  difficult  because  they  run  down  into  fundamental 
principles.  They  lead  us  into  difficulty  but  that  is  the 
only  place  that  it  is  worth  while  for  us  to  go,  because 


72      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

our  problem  is  not  one  of  mechanics,  nor  of  external 
adjustments,  but  the  hard  problem  of  love,  of  confidence, 
of  the  freedom,  power  and  strength  that  invariably  go 
with  life.  This  is  the  second  thing  the  churches  have 
learned. 

III.  In  the  third  place  we  have  learned  even  more 
clearly  that  the  pathway  of  cooperative  advance  lies 
through  the  field  of  action  and  embodied  activity  and  serv- 
ice, rather  than  through  the  field  of  discussion  or  of  the  at- 
tempt to  settle  the  theoretical  principles  of  such  activities 
and  service.  We  are  united  as  together  we  face  tasks  and 
by  the  magnitude  and  urgency  of  the  tasks  are  drawn 
together  to  their  doing.  Not  that  I  do  not  appreciate 
theory.  In  the  last  analysis  that  is  all  it  comes  down  to. 
A  friend  said  recently  that  the  more  he  saw  of  what  we 
were  trying  to  do,  the  more  convinced  he  became  that 
the  only  thing  the  Church  needs  is  the  theologian,  and 
in  the  highest  sense  that  is  true.  I  have  been  thankful 
for  a  word  spoken  a  year  or  two  ago  at  a  meeting  of 
alumni  at  Princeton  when  some  reflection  or  discredit 
had  been  cast  on  the  idea  and  all  value  had  been  attributed 
to  action,  and  Dr.  Richardson  had  quoted  in  reply  the 
saying  of  Jesus,  "  The  words  that  I  speak  unto  you, 
they  are  spirit  and  they  are  life."  We  will  ever  be 
brought  back  to  this  even  if  we  do  not  start  from  it. 
But  what  we  have  learned  this  year  is  the  power  of 
embodied  undertakings.  We  have  been  discussing  a  great 
deal  the  matter  of  enlisting  young  men  for  the  Christian 
ministry.  How  are  we  going  to  get  them?  We  are 
not  going  to  get  them  simply  by  laying  before  them  prin- 
ciples. That  will  do  very  well  to  help  a  man,  but  it  is 
not  going  to  win  him  to  unaccustomed  action.     We  are 


The  Duty  of  Cooperation  73 

not  going  to  get  him  by  telling  him  the  reasons  why  a 
man  should  live  his  life  unselfishly.  We  will  get  him  as 
the  nation  got  him.  We  have  to  go  to  young  men  and 
say  to  them,  "  You  can  not  go  to  France  to-day,  but 
you  can  finish  the  war  which  is  still  unfinished  by  going 
out  into  the  world  and  building  Christ's  Kingdom,  by 
accomplishing  other  tasks  which  are  as  real  and  as  neces- 
sary as  those  you  were  going  to  France  to  accomplish." 
I  think  we  are  going  to  get  men  in  just  that  way.  One 
has  thought  a  good  deal  —  every  one  must  have  thought 
—  why  it  was  that  the  nation  was  able  to  secure  such 
sacrifice  and  service  in  the  war,  while  the  Church  has 
not  been  able  to  get  it  before  the  war  or  now.  How 
did  the  nation  succeed  in  getting  men  to  give  themselves 
away,  in  getting  the  nation  itself  to  give  everything,  its 
money,  its  life?  It  succeeded,  some  say,  because  it  asked 
for  everything.  But  the  nation  did  not  ask  for  everything, 
and  it  did  not  get  everything.  There  were  areas  of  men's 
minds  atrophying  in  the  camps,  which  the  nation  did 
not  ask  for  at  all.  Many  of  the  very  finest  aspects  of 
life  the  nation  did  not  ask  for,  and  couldn't  use.  It 
did  ask  for  men's  bodies.  I  believe  when  you  get  down 
to  the  truth  that  that  is  the  explanation.  This  is  what 
St.  Paul  asked  for:  "I  beseech  you  by  the  mercies  of 
God  that  you  present  your  bodies  a  living  sacrifice." 
That  is  what  we  may  reverently  say  God  had  to  have  in 
his  greatest  piece  of  work  —  a  body.  The  Incarnation 
was  God  in  a  body.  The  Atonement  demanded  the 
body  of  Christ's  flesh  through  death.  The  Resurrection 
included  the  resurrection  of  His  body.  All  had 
to  be  done  through  a  body.  We  see  clearly  from 
this   point    of    view    the    reason    for    the    emphasis   on 


74      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

certain  types  of  sin,  the  sin  of  evil  speech,  the  sin  of 
theft.  Evil  speech  is  the  one  sin  you  can  bite.  Stealing 
is  the  one  sin  you  can  do  only  with  your  hands.  In 
many  lands  the  punishment  for  theft  is  cutting  off  the 
hand  so  that  men  can  not  steal  any  more.  Sin  and  re- 
demption alike  are  done  in  the  body.  Our  Saviour  needed 
a  body  to  reach  us.  He  reaches  us  in  our  bodies.  By 
the  same  principle  we  deal  best  with  our  problem  of 
cooperation  as  we  embody  our  ideals,  objectify  our  ends, 
and  set  before  men  tasks  to  be  done,  ends  actually  to 
be  traveled  to,  and  arrived  at. 

The  war  has  laid  before  us  with  luminous  clearness 
more  of  these  tasks  that  demand  one  approach  through 
action.  Let  us  pick  out  four  or  five  of  these  before  which 
the  churches  will  be  impotent  if  we  can  not  adequately 
deal  with  them  in  cooperation.  There  Is  the  problem 
of  the  rightful  place  of  religion  in  the  American  Army. 
It  is  one  of  the  distressing  problems  which  the  churches 
still  confront.  I  wonder  whether  we  are  one  inch  ahead 
of  where  we  were  when  the  war  began.  It  took  months 
and  months  before  the  churches  could  get,  against  in- 
difference or  opposition,  one  chaplain  to  every  twelve 
hundred  men,  and  then  we  did  not  get  them.  There 
never  was  one  chaplain  to  every  twelve  hundred  men 
in  the  army.  We  should  have  had  almost  to  double 
the  maximum  number  of  chaplains  we  had  in  France 
before  we  would  have  had  one  to  twelve  hundred. 
The  chaplain  has  been  able  to  get  no  status.  Every 
other  branch  of  the  army  In  the  United  States  has 
a  satisfactory  relationship  which  army  chaplains  have 
not  been  able  to  get.  Maybe  It  can  be  secured  when 
General    Pershing   and    the    Chaplains'    organization    in 


The  Duty  of  Cooperation  75 

France  come  back  from  the  other  side  but  we  simply 
have  not  had  it  here  and  we  seem  unlikely  ever  to  get 
it  unless  the  churches  seek  it  unitedly  in  some  different 
way.  Indeed  they  have  hindered  themselves  by  such 
division  in  their  approach  to  the  problem  as  there  was 
during  the  war. 

In  the  second  place  there  is  the  problem  of  recruiting 
men  for  Christian  service.  There  were  nearly  five  mil- 
lion young  men  in  the  army  and  navy  of  the  United 
States.  Practically  all  of  the  men  that  we  are  going 
to  need  for  the  Christian  ministry,  for  foreign  missionary 
work,  for  the  Association  secretaryship,  for  all  of  the 
other  forms  of  Christian  and  philanthropic  service  were 
there  in  these  five  million  young  men  in  the  army  and 
navy.  The  churches  never  had  before  such  a  chance 
with  all  the  body  of  supply  physically  brought  together 
and  under  psychological  conditions  such  as  we  had  not 
known  before,  to  reap  such  a  harvest  of  leadership  as 
had  never  been  garnered  in  the  history  of  the  nation. 
There  were  also  the  men  in  the  camps  on  this  side  who 
never  got  to  France  and  who  are  rapidly  being  sent 
back  to  their  homes.  There  are  among  them  many 
men  cast  down  and  filled  with  disappointment  and 
chagrin.  They  are  going  back  to  their  homes  in  a  few 
days  or  weeks  and  they  will  be  asked,  "  What  battle  were 
you  in?  What  were  your  experiences  in  France?  "  And 
they  will  have  to  say,  "  I  was  never  in  France."  They 
laid  all  they  had  on  the  altar  of  the  nation  in  utter  and 
absolute  sacrifice  and  never  had  the  chance  to  have  that 
gift  used  in  actual  service.  There  is  going  to  be  perma- 
nent moral  damage  done  to  some  of  these  men  if  their 
great  impulse  of  sacrifice  and  devotion  can  not  be  given  an 


76      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

adequate  object,  if  we  can  not  supply  something  that  will 
atone  for  the  bitterest  disappointment  of  their  lives.  We 
can  go  to  them  to-day  and  say:  "  Men,  you  do  not  need 
to  be  cast  down.  The  war  is  not  over.  The  hardest  part 
of  the  war  is  yet  to  be  fought,  the  part  that  calls  for  the 
highest  heroism,  the  deepest  courage,  the  hardest  sacrifice. 
The  war  is  just  beginning.  Will  you  not  throw  your- 
self into  it  now  for  life  and  death?" 

There  are  the  men  on  the  other  side,  doctors,  lawyers, 
teachers,  ministers,  from  all  classes  and  occupations  at 
home,  foot-loose  now,  as  men  have  never  been,  to  give 
themselves  to  the  unselfish  service  of  mankind,  who  are 
coming  home  rapidly.  Let  me  quote  a  few  paragraphs 
from  a  letter  from  a  friend  who  is  a  Lieutenant  Colonel 
in  the  Medical  Corps  in  France: 

"  With  the  end  of  the  war  and  the  actual  signing  of  the 
peace  compacts,  which  is  now  surely  not  far  off,  all  the  mil- 
lions of  men  in  our  armies  will  be,  sooner  or  later,  returned 
to  the  home-land,  to  face  the  problem  of  their  future  employ- 
ment or  activities.  Among  them  will  be  some  thousands  of 
medical  men.  Most  of  these  men  will  return  with  their  old 
positions  and  practices  calling  for  them,  but  still  footloose. 
Many  of  them,  and  especially  the  younger  ones,  will  come  back 
to  begin  life  entirely  anew,  free  as  no  like  body  of  medical 
men  in  our  experience  have  ever  been  to  choose  the  field  of 
their  activities.  All  of  them  will  return  with  wider  views  of 
life  and  of  the  possibilities  of  their  work  than  have  heretofore 
been  common  among  medical  men. 

"  There  can  be  no  doubt  that  the  world  will  be  open  as  a 
field  for  the  efforts  of  these  men.  You  know  how  many  places 
have  been  waiting  for  the  end  of  the  war  to  release  the  medical 
men  they  are  in  need  of.  The  question  of  deepest  interest  to 
us  is  how  many  of  them  can  be  enlisted  in  the  missionary  service, 
how  many  the  mission  societies  are  prepared  to  seek  and  employ. 

"  I  know  well  that  the  problem  of  the  extent  and  character 


The  Duty  of  Cooperation  77 

of  the  medical  work  that  could  properly  be  made  part  of  the 
missionary  effort  has  long  been  the  subject  of  much  study  and 
consideration  on  your  part.  It  seems  to  me  that  this  calls  for 
definite  decisions  of  the  utmost  importance  to  the  future  of 
missions  at  this  time.  There  is  no  doubt  that  if  the  Church  is 
ready  to  go  forward,  there  is  an  opportunity  the  like  of  which 
will  never  within  our  lifetimes  come  again.  Never  again  will 
there  be  so  many  men,  peculiarly  fitted  by  their  experience  to 
listen  to  the  call  to  world-wide  service  and  also  qualified 
by  their  experience  to  meet  the  call  with  unusual  ability.  The 
question  the  Church  must  face  is  how  far  it  is  prepared  to  go 
in  enlisting  medical  men  for  work  in  foreign  fields  and  also 
what  scope  it  will  seek  to  give  to  the  men  it  secures." 

We  have  our  chance  to  present  to  these  men  the  ideal 
of  going  for\^^ard  with  that  with  which  they  had  begun. 

And  there  were  the  lads  in  our  colleges  and  universi- 
ties. Never  were  the  colleges  more  open  to  appeals  offer- 
ing men  unselfish  service,  the  moral  equivalent  of  war, 
as  they  were  at  the  time  of  the  demobilization  of  the 
Students'  Army  Training  Corps.  Unless  one  was  with 
them  then  he  can  not  imagine  the  state  of  mind  in  which 
these  boys  were.  If  ever  they  were  ripe  for  some  great 
and  heroic  appeal  they  were  ripe  for  it  then.  You  could 
not  denominationalize  the  appeal  to  them.  They  had 
heard  the  united  voice  of  their  country  speaking  and 
they  replied  to  that  united  voice.  If  the  churches  wanted 
those  lads  for  Christian  service  to-day,  it  was  necessary 
for  them  to  approach  the  problem  unitedly  with  one  heart 
and  one  appeal.  The  boys  would  have  found  their  own 
appropriate  place  of  personal  service  afterwards  if  we  could 
have  made  the  command  adequate  enough  and  spoken  to 
them  with  an  adequately  appealing  and  united  voice. 
As  a  matter  of  fact  the  opportunity  was  allowed  to  pass  by. 


78      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

In  the  third  place  there  is  the  problem  of  Christianity 
and  education.  He  is  a  blind  man  who  does  not  see  that 
one  great  lesson  that  this  war  has  taught  is  the  importance 
of  education  to  national  character  and  purpose.  Never 
again  will  the  State  be  willing  to  allow  the  education  of 
the  nation  to  slip  out  of  its  fingers  as  it  has  let  it 
slip  out  in  the  past.  ''  What  is  the  next  lesson  of  the 
war?"  asked  Lloyd  George  in  a  speech  at  Manchester, 
and  he  answered,  "  We  must  pay  more  attention  to  the 
school.  The  most  formidable  institution  we  had  to  fight 
in  Germany  was  not  the  arsenals  of  Krupp  or  the  yards 
in  which  they  turned  out  submarines,  but  the  schools  of 
Germany.  They  were  our  most  formidable  competitors 
in  business  and  our  most  terrible  opponents  in  war.  An 
educated  man  is  a  better  worker,  a  more  formidable 
warrior  and  a  better  citizen.  That  was  only  half  com- 
prehended here  before  the  war."  What  some  have  been 
criticizing  in  Japan  is  just  what  w^e  may  anticipate  that 
many  nations  will  seek  to  do  in  the  days  that  lie  ahead 
of  us.  We  see  what  the  education  of  a  nation  skillfully 
guided  can  accomplish.  Processes,  carefully  thought  out 
by  men  who  know  the  principles  of  genetic  psychology 
as  this  war  has  illustrated  them  afresh,  are  going  to  play 
on  us  and  our  children  after  us.  State  supervision  and 
other  secular  administration  of  these  processes  and  of 
the  ordinary  forms  of  education  are  inevitable.  The 
Christian  churches  are  facing  a  problem  the  right  solution 
of  which  is  vital  to  the  very  life  of  Christianity.  And  we 
are  never  going  to  solve  that  problem  along  our  old  lines 
of  division  and  separation,  of  not  bringing  our  forces 
together  in  a  way  to  meet  the  consequences  of  secularized 


TJi,e  Duty  of  Cooperation  79 

education  with  which  we  shall  have  to  deal.  I  have  a 
friend  who  has  taught  for  some  years  in  the  philosophical 
faculty  in  one  of  our  five  largest  American  universities. 
This  friend  has  told  me  that  out  of  twenty-six  professors 
and  associate  professors  of  philosophy  there  were  only 
two  in  the  faculty  who  did  not  teach  a  mechanistic  view 
of  life.  And  this  university  is  perhaps  doing  as  much 
as  any  other  to  shape  the  educational  life  of  America. 
And  it  is  only  too  representative.  The  Christian  churches 
have  to  deal  unitedly  with  the  problem  of  Christian 
education,  if  they  do  not  want  the  ground  cut  from  under 
them  by  processes  of  secularized  education  which  will 
teach  philosophical  theories  that  are  absolutely  fatal  to 
all  which  we  most  dearly  believe  both  in  politics  and  in 
religion,  and  if  the  \\  ork  of  a  moralized  American  educa- 
tion of  all  the  people  is  to  be  achieved. 

In  the  fourth  place  consider  this  great  complex  of 
problems  which  are  developing  on  the  home  mission  hori- 
zon. The  new  home  mission  responsibilities  need  to 
be  interpreted  in  the  richest  way.  It  will  be  a  great 
loss  if  after  the  war  we  do  not  accept  a  far  ampler  view 
of  the  functions  of  all  our  home  mission  agencies.  We 
can  easily  name  some  of  the  problems.  Again  and  again 
to-day  we  refer  to  the  problem  of  the  returning  soldier. 
The  problem  of  the  returning  soldier  can  not  be  handled 
in  a  divided  way  by  a  score  of  competing  denominations. 
Of  course  the  soldier  who  goes  back  to  his  own  communion 
will  be  welcome  there,  but  there  are  tens  of  thousands 
of  these  men  who  had  no  denominational  attachment  be- 
fore they  went  abroad.  Are  they  all  to  be  scrambled 
for  by  the  churches,  each  one  offering  its  own  wares? 


8o     The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

The  problems  can  be  met  only  as  with  a  comprehensive 
spirit  and  united  approach,  the  Church  of  this  land  deals 
with  them  in  sincerity  and  unselfishness. 

And  the  problems  are  far  more  complex  than  the  mere 
issue  of  associating  the  soldier  with  a  particular  Christian 
organization  upon  his  return  to  his  community.  Is  he 
to  be  a  different  sort  of  citizen  in  the  light  of  his  experi- 
ence, different  in  his  own  ideals  and  demands,  different 
in  his  contribution  to  the  community  and  the  nation? 
And  the  problem  of  the  community  to  which  he  returns 
is  a  greater  problem  than  he  is.  Is  it  to  be  the  same 
kind  of  community  it  was  before  and  what  is  the  Church 
going  to  do  to  deal  with  it?  Are  the  old  American 
ideals  of  democracy,  tolerance  and  respect  to  be  perpet- 
uated? There  is  the  problem  of  community  Christian 
education.  There  are  hopeful  experiments  already  being 
made  in  this  field  to  effect  the  adequate  coordination  and 
guidance  of  all  Christian  forces.  The  day  has  gone  by 
when  the  denominational  Sunday  School  alone,  one  of  our 
most  valuable  Christian  forces,  isolated  from  other  agen- 
cies and  unsupported  by  all  the  Christian  energies  which 
can  be  poured  into  it,  can  cope  with  the  problem  of  re- 
ligious education  in  the  American  community.  And 
there  is  the  problem  of  community  Christian  service  as 
well  as  of  community  Christian  education.  Some  are 
foolishly  proposing  schemes  which  involve  the  abrogation 
of  the  home  as  a  Christian  and  social  institution,  but 
between  the  home  and  the  nation  there  do  lie  areas  of 
social  life  covered  vaguely  by  the  term  "  community  " 
which  are  to  be  Christianized.  The  community  to  be 
sure  is  not  a  unit.  It  has  its  horizontal  and  its  vertical 
stratifications  but  these  do  not  conform  to  the  denomina- 


The  Duty  of  Cooperation  8i 

tional  divisions  and  they  are  unified  by  common  inter- 
ests and  common  social  issues  which  require  of  the  Church 
a  community  consciousness  and  a  community  approach. 
There  is  also  and  on  a  national  scale  the  problem  of  our 
moral  and  social  health.  The  churches  can  handle  such 
a  problem  only  as  they  handle  it  unitedly.  The  war  has 
given  them  such  an  opportunity.  It  has  shown  that 
certain  things  are  essential  to  the  highest  efficiency  of 
soldiers,  that  if  we  are  going  to  fight  a  successful  war, 
we  can  not  do  it  with  drunken  and  diseased  men.  If 
we  can  not  fight  a  great  war  with  that  kind  of  men,  can 
we  build  a  great  nation  in  time  of  peace  with  that  kind 
of  men?  We  have  discovered  that  the  type  of  man  we 
need  in  time  of  war  is  the  type  of  man  we  need  in  time 
of  peace.  We  see  new  ideals  in  this  matter  and  not  only 
new  ideals  but  new  possibilities  as  well.  We  have  real- 
ized that  there  are  certain  moral  achievements  not  to  be 
left  in  the  realm  of  the  impracticable;  that  it  is  possible 
to  wipe  out  the  saloon  and  that  it  is  possible  to  wipe  out 
the  brothel.  If  for  eighteen  months  of  war  it  was  demon- 
strated that  it  was  possible  to  keep  the  brothel  and  saloon 
five  miles  away  from  our  men  in  the  Army,  why  shall 
it  not  be  possible  to  destroy  them  and  keep  them  away 
from  the  young  men  outside  of  the  Army  for  all  time? 
But  who  dreams  that  it  can  be  done  by  disunited  effort? 
And  there  is  the  problem  of  the  unification  of  the  national 
spirit  and  the  true  American  education  of  all  the  foreign 
elements  in  the  national  body.  We  may  describe  it  in 
all  sorts  of  terms,  assimilation,  Americanization,  nation- 
alization. It  is  a  common  task  that  can  be  worked  at 
of  course  by  all  kinds  and  groups  of  people,  but  they  can 
work  it  out  efficiently  only  as  they  unwastefully  coordi- 


82      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

nate  their  forces  in  a  common  service  and  to  one  great  end, 
and  as  they  face  the  economic  and  psychological  elements 
of  the  problem  in  the  spirit  and  with  the  principles  of 
Christianity.  How  otherwise  are  just  grievances  of  the 
negro  race  and  of  those  who  suffer  from  economic  in- 
justice to  be  dealt  with  and  cleared  away? 

In  the  fifth  place  there  are  the  new  demands  for  coop- 
eration and  coordination  in  connection  with  the  foreign 
missionary  undertaking  and  the  need  of  the  organic  con- 
solidation of  whatever  can  be  organically  consolidated. 
We  started  the  foreign  missionary  work  in  America  with 
a  great  ideal,  with  the  ideal  that  one  organization  might 
operate  foreign  missionary  work  for  the  American 
churches,  and  the  American  Board  for  some  years  embod- 
ied that  ideal.  It  proved  premature.  And  there  has  been 
enormous  gain  in  the  last  one  hundred  years  from  the 
denominational  differentiation  of  foreign  missionary  re- 
sponsibility, but  we  may  be  coming  around  now  to  a  re- 
turn in  part  at  least  to  those  great  ideals  with  which 
we  began.  We  are  clear  at  any  rate  that  there  ought 
to  be  the  closest  consolidation  of  our  approach  to  the 
non-Christian  world.  There  is  also  the  whole  problem 
of  missionary  education  at  home.  We  are  coming  to 
unity  of  mind  in  this  matter,  for  the  missionary  obliga- 
tion is  one  obligation.  The  motives  that  lead  Methodists 
to  give  to  the  support  of  foreign  missions  are  identical 
with  those  that  lead  the  Presbyterians  and  Baptists  to 
give  to  the  support  of  foreign  missions.  In  effecting  the 
full  pressure  of  the  missionary  obligation  on  the  Church 
at  home,  only  united  action  can  avail.  It  is  the  universal 
Christ  who  is  to  be  made  known  to  the  world.  The 
views  of  all  of  us  about  Him  are  still  less  than  He,  and 


The  Duty  of  Cooperation  83 

our  combined  apprehension  of  Him  alone  can  furnish 
adequate  and  commanding  motive  to  any  group  or  division. 
The  war  revealed  in  many  different  spheres  the  power  of 
united  pressures. 

And  further,  there  Is  the  necessity  In  the  United  States 
of  our  supplying  through  the  foreign  missions'  concep- 
tions the  ideas  that  must  underlie  the  basis  of  peace 
which  must  be  laid  if  this  war  is  not  to  have  been  waged 
in  vain.  It  is  the  foreign  missionary  enterprise  which 
is  the  custodian  of  the  principles  on  which  alone  the 
League  of  Nations  can  ever  be  built  up.  These  principles 
can  not  be  isolated  as  the  property  of  any  one  group. 
No  one  group  can  adequately  proclaim  them.  If  they 
belong  to  one  they  belong  to  us  all.  It  is  what  is  the 
property  of  us  all  in  those  principles  which  can  alone 
sustain  a  friendly  world  order  and  by  as  much  as  we 
believe  In  that,  by  as  much  as  we  believe  that  the  blood 
of  eight  million  men  will  have  been  shed  in  vain  unless 
that  is  to  be  achieved,  by  that  much  are  we  under  obli- 
gation to  accomplish  any  new  pressure  of  coordination 
necessary  to  our  supplying  to  the  world  the  fundamental 
conceptions  that  underlie  a  new  and  brotherly  interna- 
tional   relationship. 

The  third  lesson  from  the  last  year  accordingly  is  that 
we  have  before  us  certain  great  indivisible  tasks;  that 
these  tasks  if  we  will  attack  them  together  will  supply 
us  with  the  most  effective  path  of  advance  In  denomina- 
tional cooperation. 

IV.  A  fourth  lesson  which  the  experience  of  the  year 
has  taught  the  churches  relates  to  the  processes  and 
the  forms  of  their  cooperative  action.  There  has  not 
been  any  new  discovery.     There  has  been  only  a  larger 


84      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

application  of  what  had  already  been  ascertained  and 
was  already  existent  in  the  forms  of  organization  and 
service  in  the  Federal  Council  of  the  Churches.  Only 
the  emphasis  was  changed  somewhat.  There  had  been 
two  types  of  associated  action  through  the  commissions 
of  the  Federal  Council.  In  one  the  Federal  Council 
selected  individuals  and  brought  them  together  in  a 
commission  w^ith  considerable  freedom  of  action  and  with 
responsibility  to  the  Federal  Council  alone.  In  the  other 
method  the  attempt  to  correlate  the  organic  activities  of 
the  denominations  and  to  bring  them  together  did  not 
give  the  same  freedom  that  the  first  method  did,  but  it 
did  give  a  larger  weight  of  responsibility.  The  General 
War  Time  Commission  of  the  Churches,  the  central  war 
agency  of  the  churches,  made  use  chiefly  of  this  second 
method  during  the  war.  The  committees  which  it  estab- 
lished, the  Committee  on  Training  and  Recruiting  Men 
for  the  Ministry,  the  Committee  on  War  Production 
Communities  and  the  work  which  they  did  constituted 
some  of  the  best  work  of  the  war.  They  represented  the 
attempt  to  bring  together  the  organic  activities  of  denomi- 
nations. There  has  been  during  the  last  few  years  a  great 
growth  of  the  sense  of  denominational  personality  and 
we  do  not  want  to  break  that  down  unless  there  is  some- 
thing better  to  take  its  place.  The  danger  is  that  it  is 
breaking  down  and  dissolving  in  some  directions  before 
it  has  entirely  fulfilled  its  functions.  In  the  war  work 
of  the  churches  the  effort  was  honestly  made  to  conserve 
all  that  is  good.  Some  said  that  the  churches  were  mak- 
ing a  mistake  and  emphasizing  denominationalism.  All 
that  those  who  ever  acted  for  them  were  trying  to  do 
was  to  bring  together  in  an  effective  cooperative  way  the 


The  Duty  of  Cooperation  85 

really  responsible  denominational  agencies.  That  method 
may  hold  back  some  of  the  more  far-visioned  and  en- 
thusiastic men.  Perhaps  it  is  wise  that  they  should  be 
held  back  a  little,  while  we  keep  together  the  men  who 
represent  the  organic  responsibility  of  the  different  com- 
munions and  seek  by  mutual  interchange  to  get  forward. 
And  it  will  be  a  great  pity  if  as  we  go  forward  we  do 
not  conserve  all  the  gains  of  the  past  in  this  regard,  even 
if  it  makes  some  of  us  impatient  because  the  progress  is 
not  so  rapid  as  it  might  be  if  we  might  detach  ourselves 
from  these  responsible  relationships.  The  Foreign  Mis- 
sions Conference  of  North  America  and  the  Home  Mis- 
sions Council  of  the  United  States  illustrate  the  strength 
of  this  method  of  cooperation. 

We  should  learn  to-day  from  the  war  a  further  lesson 
as  to  the  process  of  leadership  that  one  might  not  per- 
haps learn  so  readily  in  days  of  peace.  The  problem 
in  the  war  has  been  not  so  much  to  create  energies,  as 
to  guide  and  shape  them.  The  war  split  open  the  soul 
of  America,  and  great  tides  of  moral  and  spiritual  power 
have  come  gushing  out  which  needed  only  wise  guidance 
and  relationship.  This  may  not  be  so  true  in  the  future 
days  of  peace,  but  for  the  present  these  tides  are  still  run- 
ning. The  next  great  step  which  is  to  be  accomplished  in 
the  name  of  the  Church  and  under  the  guidance  of  some 
agency  of  the  Church  which  represents  the  full  con- 
sciousness of  the  Church,  is  to  bring  these  forces  to- 
gether in  this  time.  It  is  amazing  how  many  of  them 
there  are  loose  to-day  in  American  life  and  the  need  is 
great  of  drawing  them  together  and  giving  wise  guidance 
to  these  energies.  There  is  also  much  bewilderment  in 
America  to-day.     Is  there  one  who  has  not  been  hearing 


86      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

from  the  younger  men  In  the  ministry  of  the  perplexity 
with  which  they  are  facing  their  problems?  Some  device 
must  be  set  up  which  will  accomplish  the  correlation  of 
all  these  energies  and  give  men's  minds  wise  and  united 
guidance  in  the  common  task. 

V.  And  lastly,  there  is  a  fifth  lesson.  We  have  learned 
from  this  war  that  men  have  no  business  going  into  a 
war  unless  they  intend  to  stay  in  it  until  it  has  been  won. 
There  was  a  time,  some  months  ago,  when  the  President 
recommended  a  "  peace  without  victory,"  but  his  recom- 
mendation was  not  accepted  by  one  section  of  those  to 
whom  it  was  addressed.  The  section  willing  to  accept 
the  suggestion  reminds  us  of  the  story  of  the  two  women 
who  appeared  before  Solomon.  One  of  them,  we  re- 
member, was  ready  for  a  peace  without  victory.  And 
we  remember  which  one  it  was.  If  anybody  had  ad- 
dressed to  the  President  after  we  had  entered  the  war 
such  an  exhortation  he  would  have  met  it  exactly  as  the 
allied  nations  of  Europe  met  it  from  him.  We  know 
that  a  nation  has  no  business  to  go  into  a  war  if  it  is 
not  ready  to  choose  between  two  alternatives,  either 
to  win  the  war  or  to  be  destroyed.  Only  the  willing- 
ness to  make  such  a  choice  can  justify  the  extremity 
of  w^ar.  And  I  believe  we  went  into  it  on  that  prin- 
ciple. Once  we  had  gone  into  it  nothing  until  the  end 
of  time  would  have  brought  us  out  until  the  war  had 
been  won  or  we  had  been  utterly  overthrown.  I  remem- 
ber a  conference  which  we  had  with  one  of  our  visitors 
from  Great  Britain  a  short  time  ago,  just  after  his 
arrival  here,  when  we  were  discussing  this  matter.  He 
was  feeling  exceedingly  despondent.  He  did  not  be- 
lieve that  Germany  ever  would  be  defeated.     He  believed 


The  Duty  of  Cooperation  87 

that  the  war  would  end  without  any  decisive  triumph  for 
the  principles  for  which  we  were  contending.  We  said  he 
did  not  understand  America.  America  might  have  a 
reputation  for  mercurial  and  changeable  spirit  but  it 
was  not  so  and  once  she  had  set  her  hand  to  a  task  like 
this  she  would  never  take  her  hand  off  until  the  task  w^as 
done.  And  now  the  same  principle  holds  in  all  spheres  of 
action.  We  have  started  on  certain  relationships  in  the 
attempt  to  accomplish  certain  tasks.  There  is  no  withdraw- 
ing from  them.  We  have  set  out  as  a  Christian  Church  in 
a  great  war.  There  is  no  holding  back  and  there  is  no 
stopping  until  we  get  through,  absolutely  none.  This  move- 
ment of  closer  codrdination  and  cooperation  is  never  going 
to  stop.  It  is  going  to  grow  year  by  year  with  increasing 
power.  We  may  make  mistakes.  It  is  conceivable  that 
we  should  make  such  colossal  mistakes  as  to  destroy  any 
existing  agencies  of  cooperation  so  that  new  agencies 
would  have  to  be  set  up  in  their  stead,  but  as  sure  as  there 
will  be  a  sunrise  to-morrow  another  agency  would  be 
set  up  in  their  stead,  because  we  are  moving  in  a  great 
progress  from  which  w^e  can  never  draw  out  or  be  drawn 
back.  The  only  question  we  face  to-day  is  whether  we 
are  going  to  be  courageous  enough,  disinterested  enough, 
wise  enough  to  discern  our  time  and  to  pass  into  this 
time  with  instrumentalities  which  we  are  called  upon  to 
devise  and  control  and  direct  that  are  adequate  for  the 
tasks  of  this  day.  All  of  the  great  values  that  have  come 
out  of  the  war  with  us  call  upon  us  for  this  thing  —  the 
realization  of  how  much  more  powerful  great  moral  ideals 
are  than  all  things  else,  the  discovery  of  how  the  sense 
of  something  better  ahead  can  command  anything  from 
men,  and,  what  is  in  one  sense  more  wonderful  even  than 


88      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

all  of  these,  and  what  the  soldier  feels  to  have  been  the 
greatest  thing  that  the  war  has  brought  to  him,  the  sheer 
glory  of  an  unwithholding  comradeship.  In  the  camps, 
in  the  trenches,  wherever  the  soldiers  wxre,  this  was 
the  splendid  achievement  of  their  great  experience, 
the  communized  consciousness  of  a  brotherhood  that 
shares  everything,  that  has  pooled  men's  life  blood,  that 
has  made  them  one  in  one  great  sacrificial,  national  en- 
deavor. Can  we  not  match  that  and  surpass  it  in  the 
body  of  Christ?  Do  not  hours  come  when  we  know  we 
have  matched  it,  when  we  feel  the  glow  in  our  own  hearts, 
the  longing  to  cross  the  chasms  between  man  and  man, 
to  produce  at  last  here  in  the  midst  of  our  nation  to-day 
a  fellowship  so  real,  so  commanding,  that  in  the  atmos- 
phere of  it  we  do  not  need  to  solve  our  problems,  for  we 
shall  find  that  they  have  disappeared? 


THE   WAR   AIMS   AND   FOREIGN   MISSIONS 

The  war  was  so  big  and  ft  is  still  so  near  that  it  is  not 
possible  yet  to  comprehend  it.  It  has  a  thousand  faces 
which  we  shall  be  studying  all  the  rest  of  our  lives  and 
centuries  will  have  to  pass  before  men  can  see  it  in  its 
true  perspective  and  proportion.  But  some  things  about 
it  are  already  sufficiently  clear.  And  one  of  them  is 
that  the  war  was  the  greatest  proclamation  of  foreign 
missions  which  we  have  ever  heard. 

It  is  interesting  to  mark  the  way  in  which,  one  after 
another,  the  great  ideas  and  principles  of  the  missionary 
enterprise  were  taken  over  and  declared  by  the  nation 
as  its  moral  aims  in  the  war.  If  we  will  review 
these  aims  we  shall  see  how  completely  they  have  been 
accepted  from  the  foreign  missionary  undertaking.  There 
ought  not  to  be  any  doubt  or  misgiving  in  our  minds  as 
to  what  the  aims  were  which,  as  we  believed,  justified 
us  in  what  we  did,  and  which,  if  they  were  valid  during 
the  war,  as  they  were,  are  equally  valid  now ;  for  certainly 
what  we  fought  for  in  the  war  we  have  no  right  to  re- 
pudiate now  in  peace. 

What  was  it  for  which  we  fought  In  the  war?  To 
avoid  reading  back  Into  the  struggle  moral  aims  which 
are  an  afterthought  and  which  are  imagined  Into  the 
struggle  for  apologetic  or  homiletic  purposes,  let  me  re- 

89 


90     The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

call  words  written  in  the  midst  of  the  war  times,  when 
we  were  striving  to  see  clearly  our  present  duty  without 
thought  of  any  later  moral  inferences  that  might  be  drawn 
from  the  statements  of  duty  that  then  satisfied  us.  These 
words  were  written  with  no  reference  to  foreign  missions 
but  with  a  view  to  defining  for  the  Christian  conscience 
the  purposes  which  warranted  the  war.  This  was  the 
statement : 

There  ought  to  be  no  doubt  among  Christian  men  as  to  what 
we  are  fighting  for  in  the  war, —  as  to  the  great  moral  and 
spiritual  ends  which  justify  it. 

We  are  fighting  to  put  an  end,  if  we  can,  to  war  and  to  the 
burden  and  terror  of  armaments.  It  cannot  be  too  often  said 
that  it  is  a  war  against  war  that  we  are  waging.  Both  mili- 
tarists and  pacifists  often  deride  this  idea,  the  former  because 
they  do  not  think  that  war  can  be  or  perhaps  ought  to  be 
destroyed,  the  latter  because  they  do  not  believe  that  war  can 
ever  be  ended  by  war.  But  there  are  millions  of  men  who 
hate  war  and  believe  it  must  be  ended  and  who  are  able 
with  conscience  and  determination  to  support  this  war  because 
it  seems  to  them  unavoidable  and  necessary  as  a  struggle 
directly  aimed  at  war  itself.  They  did  not  want  war.  The 
precipitation  of  the  war  by  Germany  outraged  all  their  deepest 
convictions.  And  the  principles  and  convictions  and  practices 
as  to  the  nature  and  method  of  war  on  the  part  of  Germany 
seem  to  these  millions  of  men  to  be  intolerable  on  our  earth. 
To  give  them  unhindered  room  would  make  the  world  an 
impossible  home  for  free  and  friendly  men.  They  must  be 
destroyed.  War  against  them  is  war  against  war.  It  is  war 
for  peace. 

This  purpose  also  nerves  the  men  at  the  front  on  whom  the 
burden  falls  heaviest.  They  see  the  irrationality  and  wicked- 
ness of  war  more  clearly  than  any  one  else.  What  sustains 
them  is  the  thought  that  they  are  enduring  it  so  that  no  one 
else  may  have  to  endure  it.  The  thing  is  so  dreadful  that  it 
is  worth  every  sacrifice  to  slay  it  and  to  make  sure  that  the 
world  will  not  have  to  go  through  it  again. 

We  are  fighting  against  aggressive  autocracy.    Not  yet  against 


The  War  Aims  and  Foreign  Missions     91 

autocracy  itself.  We  disbelieve  in  it  and  we  fear  it,  but  if  any 
nation  wants  it  for  itself  and  can  have  it  without  letting  it 
imperil  all  other  nations  thus  far  we  have  said  that  we  have 
no  right  to  interfere.  It  is  not  our  business.  Each  people  has 
the  right  of  self-government.  But  we  cannot  sit  quiet  and  let 
autocracy,  unwilling  to  stay  at  home,  go  abroad  to  rule  the 
world.  It  is  the  strong  nation  invading  other  nations,  attack- 
ing the  rights  of  humanity,  perpetrating  wrong  and  injustice, 
that  must  be  resisted  and  bound  to  keep  the  peace,  just  as  the 
strong  man  breaking  the  laws  of  society  and  perpetrating  wrong 
and  injustice  in  the  state  must  be  bound  to  desist  from  wrong. 

We  are  fighting  against  the  claim  of  nations  to  be  above  the 
moral  law.  A  state  cannot  endure  if  one  class  of  its  citizens 
is  allowed  to  excuse  itself  from  the  moral  obligations  which 
bind  all  others.  And  the  world  cannot  endure  if  any  nation  is 
allowed  to  set  itself  above  the  principles  of  truth  and  justice 
and  righteousness  which  have  their  ground  in  the  character  of 
God  and  which  are  the  foundation  of  individual  life  and  must 
be  the  foundation  of  international  life  and  of  international 
relationship.  It  is  moral  anarchy  for  any  nation  to  set  itself 
and  its  interests  above  the  laws  of  God,  which  are  laws  of 
universal  right  and  justice. 

We  are  fighting  against  the  idea  of  power  as  its  own  law, 
against  the  ancient  claim  of  might  to  be  its  own  right.  This 
idea,  if  yielded  to,  puts  an  end  to  civilization.  If  we  merely 
match  might  with  might  and  try  to  disprove  the  claims  of 
might  by  superior  might  we  support  the  very  law  we  attack. 
But  if  we  use  might  for  right  and  hold  it  subject  to  right,  and 
repudiate  utterly  the  principle  that  it  is  or  can  be  anything 
apart  from  right,  we  may  safely  and  we  must  unyieldingly 
oppose  what  strength  we  have  or  can  get  from  God  against 
the  falsehood  of  power  as  its  own  warrant  for  aught  that  it 
can  do.  The  very  essence  of  evil  is  in  this  falsehood  and 
must  be  destroyed. 

And  we  are  not  only  fighting  against  great  falsehoods  and 
wrong,  we  are  fighting  for  a  new  world  order  of  concord  and 
peace  and  justice.  Just  as  in  each  nation  the  elements  which 
had  to  be  combined  were  compelled  to  give  up  their  separate 
claim  to  the  end  that  a  righteous  and  stable  political  order  could 


92      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

be  established,  so  now  we  realize  that  the  world  must  in  some 
simple  and  practical  way  be  reorganized  to  provide  some  in- 
strumentality of  international  justice  which  will  settle  difficulties 
by  peaceful,  judicial  processes,  as  men  settle  their  difficulties 
among  themselves  without  murder  or  any  violence.  To  carry 
mankind  forward  by  such  a  big  advance  is  worth  any  sacrifice 
necessary  to  win  it. 

All  of  these  things  ought  to  have  been  won  without  war. 
They  have  not  been.  Against  our  wills  the  great  war  which 
involves  these  issues  came  out  and  laid  hold  upon  us  and, 
whether  we  would  or  no,  we  had  to  take  up  our  part.  And 
now  that  duty  cannot  be  played  with.  Asking  God  for  His 
forgiveness  for  all  that  has  been  wrong  in  ourselves,  humbly 
trusting  His  grace  and  seeking  His  strength,  we  are  to  take 
up  our  task  in  the  spirit  of  those  who  know  only  one  fidelity, 
the  fidelity  that  knows  no  yielding  until  its  task  is  done. 
Without  hate  or  pride  or  wrong-doing,  without  using  against 
evil  the  evil  we  deplore,  without  malice  toward  any  one  and 
with  charity  toward  all  men,  including  our  foes,  with  patience 
and  tenacity  and  deathless  devotion,  we  are  to  do  the  work  that 
has  come  to  us  until  it  is  done  and  done  to  last. 

It  is  the  business  of  the  Church  to  keep  clear  and  unconfused 
these  moral  ends  which  alone  justify  the  war,  to  warn  men 
against  hate  and  evil  will,  to  strengthen  in  men's  hearts  the 
sense  of  deathless  devotion  to  duty,  to  encourage  faith  in  the 
possibility  of  establishing  on  the  earth  a  righteous  order  worth 
living  and  dying  for,  to  show  men  that  they  must  and  can 
behave  now  as  citizens  in  a  manner  worthy  of  the  Gospel 
of  Christ,  to  maintain  in  the  soul  of  the  nation  an  unswerving 
loyalty  to  righteousness  and  a  fearless  love  of  all  humanity, 
to  make  the  nation  humble  and  penitent  before  God,  and  to 
summon  it  to  such  obedience  to  God's  holy  law  that  it  can 
confidently  offer  itself  to  Him  for  the  accomplishment  of  His 
purposes  of  justice  and  truth. 

Here  were  five  clear  moral  aims:  to  put  an  end  to 
war,  and  the  fear  of  war  and  the  burden  of  arma- 
ments, to  assure  human  freedom,  to  assert  and  establish  the 


The  War  Aims  and  Foreign  Missions     93 

principle  of  international  righteousness,  to  use  strength 
for  human  service,  to  prepare  the  way  for  an  order  of 
truth  and  justice  and  brotherhood.  As  the  war  went 
on  these  aims  grew  clearer  and  firmer.  ( i )  ''  This  is 
a  war  to  end  war "  became  a  universal  watchword. 
The  military  spirit  which  kindled  and  flamed  in  human 
hearts  blazed  most  fiercely  against  militarism,  and  re- 
pudiated with  deepening  horror  and  loathing  the  whole 
philosophy  of  war,  its  colossal  inefficiency  and  its  exorbi- 
tant waste.  (2)  The  indignation  against  the  autocratic 
governments  which  were  responsible  for  the  war,  although 
at  first  this  indignation  proclaimed  no  doom  upon  autoc- 
racy as  a  political  theory,  came  gradually  to  realize  that 
autocracy  can  not  confine  itself  to  any  bounds  and  is  not 
able  to  be  harmless.  The  spread  of  the  spirit  of  liberty 
of  itself  overthrew  one  by  one  all  the  autocracies  that 
entered  the  war.  (3)  The  nation  saw  with  increasing 
clearness  that  wrong  is  wrong  no  matter  who  perpe- 
trates it,  whether  a  nation  or  a  man,  and  likewise  that 
the  duty  of  service  and  protection  is  a  national  as  well 
as  a  personal  duty.  (4)  The  war  became  a  great  enter- 
prise of  human  service.  Nations  fed  one  another  and 
stood  ready  to  die  for  one  another  and  for  the  safety 
of  mankind.  (5)  And  above  all  as  time  went  on  men 
realized  that  they  were  in  this  struggle  for  the  sake 
of  what  lies  ahead  of  us,  for  the  hope  of  a  new  human 
order  —  an  order  of  righteousness  and  of  justice  and  of 
brotherhood.  If  it  were  not  for  that  hope  ahead,  all 
the  arguments  that  spring  from  what  lies  behind  would 
not  have  been  enough  to  sustain  men.  Once  men  had 
got  into  their  minds  that  the  same  thing  was  going  to 
be  afterward  that  was  before,  the  war  would  have  been 


94      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

over  that  day  or  the  next.  Men  were  not  going  into  the 
war  and  dying  for  the  sake  of  punishing  somebody  for 
what  lay  behind  alone,  or  for  the  sake  of  executing  venge- 
ance for  great  wrongs.  You  cannot  sustain  sacrifices  like 
these  or  memories.  They  must  be  sustained  on  great 
expectations.  Even  our  Lord,  Himself,  was  upheld  by 
what  lay  before  Him,  "  Who  for  the  joy  that  was  set 
before  him  endured  the  cross,  despising  shame,  and  hath 
sat  down  at  the  right  hand  of  the  throne  of  God." 

I  have  named  just  as  briefly  as  I  could  what  seem  to 
me  to  be  five  of  the  great  moral  justifications  for  the 
war,  justifications  that  made  legitimate  the  sacrifices  that 
were  poured  out,  and  that  laid  the  obligation  of  the 
struggle  to  the  last  effort  upon  every  life  in  our  land. 
But,  when  we  have  said  this,  have  we  said  anything  more 
than  just  to  put  into  political  terms,  in  connection  with 
the  great  struggle,  the  aims  and  ideals  and  purposes  for 
which  many  men  have  been  living  all  their  lives,  which 
have  actuated  the  missionary  enterprise,  and  which  under- 
lie it  to-day?  What  does  that  enterprise  exist  for? 
What  has  it  been  seeking  to  do,  and  in  reality  doing  all 
the  years  since  it  began? 

It  has  been  in  the  world  as  an  instrumentality  of  peace 
and  international  good  will.  Wherever  it  has  gone,  it 
has  erased  racial  prejudice  and  bitterness,  the  great  root 
of  international  conflict  and  struggle.  It  has  helped  men 
to  understand  one  another.  It  has  rubbed  off  the  fric- 
tions. ''  Christianity  continues  to  spread  among  the 
Karens,"  said  the  Administration  Report  for  British 
Burmah  for  1 880-1881,  "to  the  great  advantage  of  the 
Commonwealth,  and  the  Christian  Karen  communities 
are  distinctly  more  industrious,  better  educated  and  more 


The  War  Aims  and  Foreign  Missions     95 

law-abiding  than  the  Burman  and  Karen  villages  around 
them.  The  Karen  race  and  |:he  British  government  owe 
a  great  debt  to  the  American  missionaries  who  have, 
under  Providence,  wrought  this  change  among  the  Karens 
of  Burmah."  At  the  outset  of  missionary  w^ork  in  India, 
Schwartz  had  illustrated  this  power  of  missions,  com- 
manding the  confidence  of  the  people,  and  securing  peace 
and  order  where  the  East  India  Company  and  the  native 
rulers  themselves  were  helpless.  *'  Send  me  none  of  your 
agents,"  Hyder  Ali  said  to  the  Company  in  some  of  their 
negotiations.  *'  Send  me  the  Christian  missionary, 
Schwartz,  and  I  will  receive  him."  "  To  be  welcomed  in 
the  land  of  cannibals,"  said  a  Dutch  traveler  in  Sumatra, 
Lunbing  Hirum,  "  by  children  singing  hymns,  this  indeed 
shows  the  peace-creating  power  of  the  gospel."  *'  The 
benefits  "  (of  the  missionary  work  in  New  Guinea),  said 
Hugh  Milman,  a  magistrate,  **  are  immense;  inter-tribal 
fights  formerly  so  common,  being  entirely  at  an  end, 
and  trading  and  communication,  one  tribe  with  another, 
now  being  carried  on  without  fear." 

Missionaries  have  been  a  conciliatory  influence  again 
and  again,  and  have  allayed  hostility  which  diplomats 
and  traders  have  aroused.  They  did  this  in  Japan.  The 
Jijt  Shimpo,  one  of  the  leading  newspapers  in  Japan, 
spoke  of  this  in  advocating  the  sending  of  Buddhist  mis- 
sionaries to  Korea.  ''  Japanese  visiting  Korea  will  be 
chiefly  bent  upon  the  pursuit  of  gain  and  will  not  be 
disposed  to  pay  much  attention  to  the  sentiments  and 
customs  of  the  Koreans  or  to  allow  their  spirit  to  be 
controlled  by  any  consideration  of  the  country  or  the 
people.  That  was  the  case  with  foreigners  in  the  early 
days  of  Japan's  intercourse  with  them,  and  there  can  be 


g6     The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

no  doubt  that  many  serious  troubles  would  have  occurred 
had  not  the  Christian  missionary  acted  as  a  counter- 
balancing influence.  The  Christian  missionary  not  only 
showed  to  the  Japanese  the  altruistic  side  of  the  Occi- 
dental character,  but  also  by  his  teaching  and  his  preach- 
ing imparted  a  new  and  attractive  aspect  to  intercourse 
which  would  otherwise  have  seemed  masterful  and  re- 
pellent. The  Japanese  cannot  thank  the  Christian  mis- 
sionary too  much  for  the  admirable  leaven  that  he  intro- 
duced into  their  relations  with  foreigners,  nor  can  they 
do  better  than  follow  the  example  that  he  has  set,  in 
their  own  intercourse  with  the  Koreans." 

And  missionaries  in  the  same  conciliatory  spirit  have 
been  the  main  factors  in  opening  some  sealed  lands  to 
international  intercourse.  The  United  States  Govern- 
ment's treaty  with  Siam  was  negotiated  in  1856,  and 
Dr.  Wood  of  the  Embassy  wrote  that  *'  the  unselfish 
kindness  of  the  American  missionaries,  their  patience, 
sincerity  and  faithfulness,  have  won  the  confidence  and 
esteem  of  the  natives,  and  in  some  degree  transferred 
those  sentiments  to  the  nation  represented  by  the  mission- 
ary and  prepared  the  way  for  the  free  and  national  inter- 
course now  commencing.  It  was  very  evident  that  much 
of  the  apprehension  they  felt  in  taking  upon  themselves 
the  responsibilities  of  a  treaty  with  us  would  be  dimin- 
ished if  they  could  have  the  Rev.  Mr.  Mattoon  as  the 
first  United  States  Consul  to  set  the  treaty  in  motion." 
In  1 87 1,  the  Regent  of  Siam  frankly  told  Mr.  Seward, 
the  United  States  Consul-General  at  Shanghai,  "  Siam 
has  not  been  disciplined  by  English  and  French  guns  as 
China  has,  but  the  country  has  been  opened  by  mission- 
aries." 


The  War  Aims  and  Foreign  Missions     97 

Of  the  work  of  the  Scotch  Presbyterians  in  Nyassa  land, 
Joseph  Thomson,  the  traveler,  bore  testimony  after  his 
visit  in  1879.  "Where  international  effort  has  failed," 
he  said,  "  an  unassuming  Mission,  supported  only  by  a 
small  section  of  the  British  people,  has  been  quietly  and 
unostentatiously,  but  most  successfully  realizing  in  its 
own  district  the  entire  program  of  the  Brussels  Confer- 
ence. I  refer  to  the  Livingstonia  Mission  of  the  Free 
Church  of  Scotland.  This  Mission  has  proved  itself,  in 
every  sense  of  the  word,  a  civilizing  center.  By  it  slav- 
ery has  been  stopped,  desolating  wars  put  an  end  to,  and 
peace  and  security  given  to  a  wide  area  of  the  country." 
For  a  hundred  years  the  missionary  enterprise  has  been 
doing  this  over  the  entire  world,  getting  men  acquainted 
with  one  another,  showing  the  unselfishness  that  lies 
behind  much  that  seems  to  be  and  often  is  so  purely 
selfish.  It  has  always  been  and  is  to-day  an  enterprise  of 
tranquillity  and  of  peace. 

It  has  been  an  agency  of  righteousness.  As  the  years 
have  gone  by,  it  alone  has  represented  in  many  non- 
Christian  lands  the  inner  moral  character  of  the  Western 
world.  By  our  political  agencies  and  activities  we  have 
forced  great  wrongs  upon  the  non-Christian  peoples  — 
commercial  exploitation,  the  liquor  traffic,  and  the  slave 
trade  upon  Africa  and  the  South  Sea  Islands,  the  opium 
traffic  upon  China.  Against  these  things  the  one  element 
of  the  West  that  has  made  protest  has  been  the  mission- 
ary enterprise.  Year  after  year  in  those  lands  it  has 
joined  with  what  wholesome  moral  sentiment  existed 
among  the  people  in  a  death  struggle  against  the  great 
iniquities  that  Western  civilization  had  spread  over  the 
world.  It  has  been  an  instrumentality  of  international 
righteousness. 


98      The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

It  has  been  and  Is  a  great  instrumentality  of  human 
service.  It  has  scattered  tens  of  thousands  of  men  and 
women  over  many  lands,  teaching  school  in  city  and 
country,  in  town  and  village.  It  has  built  its  hospitals  by 
the  thousand.  It  has  sent  its  medical  missionaries  to 
deal  every  year  with  millions  of  sick  and  diseased  peoples 
in  Asia  and  Africa.  It  has  been  the  one  great,  con- 
tinuing, unselfish  agency  of  unquestioning,  loving,  human 
service  throughout  the  world,  dealing  not  with  emergency 
needs  of  famine  and  flood  and  pestilence  alone,  but,  year 
in  and  year  out,  serving  all  human  need  and  seeking  to 
introduce  into  human  society  the  creative  and  healing 
influences  of  Christ.  "  It  is  they  "  (the  missionaries) ,  says 
Sir  H.  H.  Johnston,  of  British  Central  Africa,  "  who 
in  many  cases  have  first  taught  the  natives  carpentry, 
joinery,  masonry,  tailoring,  cobbling,  engineering,  book- 
keeping, printing,  and  European  cookery ;  to  say  nothing  of 
reading,  writing,  arithmetic,  and  a  smattering  of  general 
knowledge.  Almost  invariably,  it  has  been  to  mission- 
aries that  the  natives  of  Interior  Africa  have  owed  their 
first  acquaintance  with  a  printing  press,  the  turning-lathe, 
the  mangle,  the  flat-iron,  the  sawmill,  and  the  brick 
mold.  Industrial  teaching  is  coming  more  and  more  in 
favor,  and  its  immediate  results  in  British  Central  Africa 
have  been  most  encouraging.  Instead  of  importing 
painters,  carpenters,  store  clerks,  cooks,  telegraphists,  gar- 
deners, natural  history  collectors  from  England  or  India, 
we  are  gradually  becoming  able  to  obtain  them  amongst 
the  natives  of  the  country,  who  are  trained  in  the  mission- 
aries' schools,  and  who  having  been  given  simple,  whole- 
some local  education,  have  not  had  their  heads  turned, 
and  are  not  above  their  station  In  life." 


The  War  Aims  and  Foreign  Missions     99 

Let  any  one  who  doubts  the  constructive  influence 
of  missions  in  molding  the  social  life,  in  affecting  insti- 
tutions, in  establishing  just  trade,  in  creating  and  foster- 
ing industries,  in  making  friendly  producers  and  con- 
sumers, in  purifying  morality  and  elevating  mankind, 
turn  to  the  second  volume  of  Dr.  Dennis's  "  Christian 
Missions  and  Social  Progress,"  and  read  there  of  the 
achievements  of  mission  work  in  these  spheres,  and  he 
will  gain  a  new  conception  of  the  power  and  value  of 
foreign  missions.  As  Dr.  Dennis  shows,  they  have  pro- 
moted temperance,  opposed  the  liquor  and  opium  traffics 
which  are  fatal  to  wise  commerce,  checked  gambling, 
established  higher  standards  of  personal  purity,  culti- 
vated industry  and  frugality,  elevated  woman,  restrained 
anti-social  customs  such  as  polygamy,  concubinage,  adul- 
tery and  child-marriage  and  infanticide,  fostered  the  sup- 
pression of  the  slave  trade  and  slave  traffic,  abolished 
cannibalism  and  human  sacrifice  and  cruelty,  organized 
famine  relief,  improved  husbandry  and  agriculture,  intro- 
duced Western  medicines  and  medical  science,  founded 
leper  asylums  and  colonies,  promoted  cleanliness  and  sani- 
tation, and  checked  war.  ''  Whatever  you  may  be  told  to 
the  contrary,"  said  Sir  Bartle  Frere,  formerly  Governor  of 
Bombay,  "  the  teaching  of  Christianity  among  i6o,ocx>,ooo 
of  civilized,  industrious  Hindus  and  Mohammedans  in 
India  is  effecting  changes,  moral,  social  and  political, 
which  for  extent  and  rapidity  of  effect  are  far  more 
extraordinary  than  anything  that  you  or  your  fathers 
have  witnessed  in  modern  Europe."  "  When  the  history 
of  the  great  African  States  of  the  future  comes  to  be 
written,"  says  Sir  H.  H.  Johnston,  bearing  witness  out 
of  ample  personal  knowledge  and  experience,   "  the  ar- 


100     The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

rival  of  the  first  missionary  will  with  many  of  these  new 
nations  be  the  first  historical  event  in  their  annals." 

Foreign  missions  have  been  a  great  agency  of  human 
unity  and  concord.  They,  at  least,  have  believed  and 
acted  upon  the  belief  that  all  men  belong  to  one  family. 
They  have  laughed  at  racial  discords  and  prejudices. 
They  have  made  themselves  unpopular  with  many  repre- 
sentatives of  the  Western  nations  who  have  gone  into 
the  non-Christian  world,  because  they  have  not  been 
willing  to  foster  racial  distrust,  because  they  have  insisted 
on  bridging  the  divisions  which  separated  men  of  different 
bloods  and  different  nationalities.  We  are  talking  now 
about  building  the  new  world  after  the  war.  But  it 
would  be  hopeless  if  we  had  not  already  begun  it.  We 
are  talking  about  some  form  of  international  organiza- 
tion. It  may  need  to  be  very  simple,  with  few  and 
primitive  functions,  but  it  must  come.  And  it  can  come 
only  as  first,  we  sustain  in  men's  hearts  a  faith  in  its 
possibility;  as  second,  we  devise  the  instrumentalities 
necessary  to  it  and  make  them  effective;  as  third,  we 
build  up  a  spirit  that  will  support  it.  Across  the  world 
for  a  hundred  years  the  missionary  enterprise  has  been 
the  proclamation  that  this  day  must  come,  and  that  some 
such  international  body  of  relationships  as  this,  based  on 
right  principles,  must  be  set  up  among  the  nations  of  the 
world. 

It  would  not  be  hard  to  go  on  analyzing  further  what 
the  missionary  enterprise  has  been  doing.  It  has  been 
doing  peacefully,  constructively,  unselfishly,  quietly  for 
a  hundred  years  exactly  the  things  that  now,  in  a  great 
outburst  of  titanic  and  necessarily  destructive  struggle, 
we  were  compelled  to  do  by  war.     I  say  it  again,  that 


The  War  Aims  and  Foreign  Missions     loi 

one  of  the  most  significant  things  of  the  day  is  to  see  how 
the  great  ideals  and  purposes  of  the  missionary  enterprise, 
that  have  been  the  commonplaces  of  some  men's  lives, 
have  been  gathered  up  as  a  great  moral  discovery  and 
made  the  legitimate  moral  aims  of  the  nation  in  the  great 
conflict  in  which  we  have  been  engaged. 

And  now  that  the  war  is  done  the  question  looks  at 
us  squarely.  Do  we  mean  all  that  we  said  and  fought 
for?  If  we  were  right  then  are  we  not  bound  to  go 
straight  on  now  and  do  by  life  in  peace  what  we  were 
ready  to  do  by  death  in  war?  The  need  for  achieving  the 
things  we  fought  for  is  here  to-day  all  over  the  world. 
The  missionary  enterprise  is  the  honest  effort  to  achieve 
them. 

And  we  need  the  missionary  enterprise  now,  strong, 
living,  aggressive;  first  of  all  because  we  require,  more 
than  we  have  ever  required  them  in  the  past,  every  pos- 
sible agency  of  international  good  will  and  interpreta- 
tion. Why  did  that  happen  In  Russia  that  did  hap- 
pen, prolonging  for  many  months  the  great  struggle? 
We  know  why  it  happened  —  m  part  at  least  because 
of  a  lack  of  adequate  interpretation  of  our  own  true 
ideals  and  national  character.  Men  who  had  lived  here 
in  our  own  land,  had  gone  back  to  Russia  by  the 
hundred,  to  misrepresent  America.  They  said  we  were 
a  capitalistic  oligarchy,  not  a  democracy,  that  privilege 
and  not  justice  ruled  our  life.  I  suppose  Trotzky  had 
never  been  in  a  company  of  two  hundred  real  Ameri- 
cans. He  returned  to  Russia,  not  knowing  the  least 
thing  of  the  real  spirit  of  the  American  nation  and  our 
true  political  ideals,  and  the  real  heart  of  the  American 
people;  and  the  same  ignorance  which  he  carried  back 


102     The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

with  him  is  in  no  small  measure  spread  far  and  wide  over 
the  world  to-day.  There  could  have  been  nothing  more 
unwise  than  the  proposition  that  we  should  recall  in  the 
war  from  Africa  and  India,  Japan  and  China  the  men 
who  are  correctly  interpreting  to  the  non-Christian  world 
the  unselfish  Christian  ideals  of  our  Western  nations. 
In  the  early  years  of  the  war  our  Government  sent  to 
the  consuls  in  China  especially  word  that  Americans 
ought  not  to  come  home;  that  if  ever  they  were  needed 
there,  they  were  needed  to-day  that  they  might  correctly 
represent  what  the  moral  purposes  of  America  are,  and 
that  by  their  good  will  and  friendliness,  they  might  be 
true  ambassadors  of  our  spirit.  We  need  not  less  to-day, 
but  more  than  ever,  the  shuttles  of  sympathy  and  service 
that  fly  to  and  fro  across  the  chasms  of  race.  The  mis- 
understandings of  the  world  are  a  tragic  thing.  We 
little  realize  how  deep  and  terrible  they  are ;  the  innumer- 
able millions  of  men  on  the  other  side  of  the  world  whose 
minds  are  unknown  to  us  and  to  whom  what  we  are 
thinking  is  unknown,  in  whose  thought  there  has  never 
entered  the  conviction  of  our  unselfish  interest  in  the 
whole  human  family,  and  of  our  desire  not  to  injure  but  to 
benefit  both  ourselves  and  with  us  all  mankind.  As 
never  before  in  the  history  of  the  world,  we  require 
every  possible  agency  of  interpretation,  of  international 
fellowship  and  brotherhood  to  be  thrown  across  the 
chasms  that  separate  the  races  and  nations  of  men. 

President  Wilson  understood  this.  At  the  height  of 
the  war  he  wrote  to  a  medical  missionary  who  had  asked 
his  advice  as  to  returning  to  China  or  entering  the  war: 
"  I  feel  that  I  am  by  no  means  qualified  to  answer  the 
question  you  put  in  your  letter  of  March  9th,  but  it  is 


The  War  Aims  and  Foreign  Missions     103 

clear  to  me  on  general  principles  that  we  must  not  rob 
eJEfort  everywhere  else  in  order  to  concentrate  it  in  France, 
unless  it  is  absolutely  necessary  to  do  so.  It  does  not 
appear  necessary  at  this  juncture,  and  my  judgment, 
diffidently  expressed,  would  be  that  your  duty  still  lay  in 
China." 

And  he  had  earlier  written  to  some  missionary  workers 
in  the  South  an  equally  strong  statement: 

"  I  entirely  agree  with  you  in  regard  to  the  missionary  work. 
I  think  it  would  be  a  real  misfortune,  a  misfortune  of  lasting 
consequence,  if  the  missionary  program  for  the  world  should 
be  interrupted.  There  are  many  calls  for  money,  of  course, 
and  I  can  quite  understand  that  it  may  become  more  difficult 
than  ever  to  obtain  money  for  missionary  enterprises,  but  that 
the  work  undertaken  should  be  continued  and  continued  .  .  . 
at  its  full  force,  seems  to  me  of  capital  necessity,  and  I  for 
one  hope  that  there  may  be  no  slackening  or  recession  of  any 
sort. 

"  I  wish  that  I  had  time  to  write  you  as  fully  as  this  great 
subject  demands,  but  I  have  put  my  whole  thought  into  these 
few  sentences  and  I  hope  you  will  feel  at  liberty  to  use  this 
expression  of  opinion  in  any  way  that  you  think  best." 

We  are  needing  to  prepare  for  the  great  undertakings 
of  peace  that  are  now  upon  us.  It  may  or  may  not  be 
a  true  principle  that  in  times  of  peace  we  should  prepare 
for  war;  but  there  cannot  be  any  doubt  about  its  being 
a  true  principle,  that  in  times  both  of  war  and  of  peace 
we  should  prepare  for  peace.  In  time  of  peace  war  may 
or  may  not  come,  but  in  time  of  war  peace  must  and 
will  come.  And  now  that  peace  has  come,  whatever 
may  be  the  decision  regarding  the  continuance  of  arma- 
ments, there  can  be  no  doubt  that  our  immediate  duty 
is  to  confront   the   tasks  of  peace.     Unless  those   tasks 


104     The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

are  met,  any  preparations  for  the  future  will  rest  on 
hollow  foundations.  Other  agencies  of  sinister  purpose 
were  preparing  diligently  throughout  the  whole  period 
of  the  war  for  this  present  time.  And  they  are  not 
relaxing  their  purposes  to-day.  Against  these  and  all  evil 
forces  every  energy  of  righteousness  must  be  aroused  both 
in  America  and  throughout  the  world.  Every  unselfish 
purpose,  the  full  measure  of  moral  consecration,  the  uplift 
and  inspiration  of  every  great  ideal  and  of  unlimited  tasks 
must  be  taken  advantage  of  now  if  the  soul  of  the  nation 
is  to  be  equal  to  its  responsibility.  We  need  every  ounce 
of  moral  and  spiritual  resolution  for  the  nation's  sake. 
Whatever  we  subtract  from  the  spiritual  outgoing  of 
the  Christian  Church  we  subtract  from  the  vitality  of 
the  nation  in  its  present  struggle. 

Necessary  as  the  great  negative  energies  of  destruction 
are,  they  can  never  achieve  the  things  that  have  to  be 
done  in  the  world.  This  business  of  war  has  been  an 
unavoidable  business,  but  its  result  is  to  work  structural 
changes.  We  cannot  say  that  it  cannot  work  any  organic 
change,  but  if  it  does  it  is  by  reason  of  the  thought  which 
it  embodies.  Such  work  has  to  be  done  by  great  prin- 
ciples, by  living  ideals,  by  the  Spirit  of  God.  Mere 
mechanisms,  the  thunder  of  guns,  the  massing  of  bodies 
of  men  never  can  do  it.  They  can  build  walls  against 
the  onset  of  wrong;  they  cannot  replace  it.  We  have 
to  let  loose  the  creative  and  constructive  spiritual  powers 
if  that  is  to  be  done,  and  there  is  no  creative  and  con- 
structive spiritual  power  the  equal  of  that  which  Christ 
released. 

And  in  Christ  alone  to-day  is  the  power  of  saving  men 
and  of  redeeming  society.     To  give  Him  to  the  world 


The  War  Aims  and  Foreign  Missions     105 

is  to  do  the  work  the  world  needs  more  than  it  needs 
anything  else.  No  man  can  do  better  with  his  life  to-day 
or  accomplish  more  for  the  world  than  by  going  out  to 
acquaint  men  with  Christ  and  to  lead  all  nations  to 
obey  and  follow  Christ  as  Saviour  and  Lord. 

The  Christian  churches  throughout  the  war  manifested 
the  spirit  which  must  now  have  yet  freer  and  richer  play. 
Both  in  Canada  and  in  Great  Britain  the  foreign  mis- 
sionary societies  year  after  year  during  the  war  closed 
their  books  not  only  without  a  deficit  but  in  many  cases 
with  a  surplus  and  with  larger  receipts  than  had  ever 
come  to  them  before.  Our  American  foreign  mission 
boards  had  the  same  experience.  The  year  of  the  war  was 
with  many  of  them  the  year  of  the  most  generous  sup- 
port of  their  work  that  they  had  ever  known. 

Indeed,  the  work  of  foreign  missions  has  never  been 
stopped  by  war.  The  great  Foreign  Missionary  So- 
cieties of  Great  Britain  were  launched  in  the  midst  of 
European  wars,  and  if  the  earlier  missionaries  from  the 
Continent  had  waited  for  times  of  world  peace  before 
setting  out  on  their  undertakings,  they  might  never 
have  gone.  The  first  foreign  missionaries  from  the  United 
States,  sent  out  by  the  American  Board,  sailed  during 
the  year  of  1812.  If  the  Church  could  ever  be  justified 
in  waiving  her  missionary  duty  in  times  of  national  diffi- 
culty it  would  have  been  during  the  Civil  War.  The 
Southern  Presbyterian  Church  projected  its  foreign  mis- 
sionary work  then.  To  quote  Dr.  Houston's  words,  in 
a  noble  address  delivered  in  Philadelphia  in  May,  1888, 
**  When  in  that  day  she  found  herself  girt  about  as  with 
a  wall  of  fire,  when  no  missionary  had  it  in  his  power 
to  go  forth  from  her  bosom  to  the  regions  beyond,  the 


io6     The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

first  General  Assembly  put  on  record  the  solemn  declara- 
tion that,  as  this  Church  now  unfurled  her  banner  to 
the  world,  she  desired  distinctly  and  deliberately  to  in- 
scribe on  it,  *  in  immediate  connection  with  the  Headship 
of  her  Lord,  His  last  command,  "  Go  ye  into  all  the 
world  and  preach  the  Gospel  to  every  creature,"  regard- 
ing this  as  the  great  end  of  her  organization,  and  obedience 
to  it  as  the  indispensable  condition  of  her  Lord's  promised 
presence.'  "  And  the  moment  the  way  was  opened  she 
sent  forth  her  sons  and  her  daughters. 

The  experience  of  the  missionary  board  of  one  of  the 
churches  in  the  Northern  States  during  the  Civil  War 
is  illustrative,  I  believe,  of  almost  all.  In  the  spring 
of  1862  the  Northern  Presbyterian  Board  reported  that 
instead  of  ending  the  year  with  a  heavy  debt,  as  was 
seriously  feared,  it  had  been  able  to  "  support  the  Missions 
in  nearly  all  cases  in  their  usual  vigor,  to  send  out  new 
laborers,  to  occupy  new  ground  in  some  instances,  and 
to  close  the  year  in  a  satisfactory  manner."  The  Board 
expressed  the  hope  ''  that  a  not  less  vigorous  support  of 
this  work  will  be  afforded  in  the  coming  year,  and  the 
trying  discipline  of  Divine  Providence  and  especially  the 
influences  of  the  Holy  Spirit  may  lead  our  churches  to 
reach  still  higher  standards  of  giving."  The  Board  ap- 
pealed accordingly  for  an  increase  of  25  per  cent,  in  the 
gifts  of  the  churches,  in  order  that  the  work  of  the  Mis- 
sions might  not  be  reduced  nor  new  missionaries  kept 
at  home.  The  General  Assembly  welcomed  these  views 
and  rejoiced  in  the  fact  that  the  largest  number  of  mis- 
sionary candidates  ever  reported  was  waiting  to  be  sent 
forth.  The  following  year  the  Board  reported  that  none 
of  the  new  missionary  candidates  had  been  kept  at  home 


The  War  Aims  and  Foreign  Missions      107 

except  for  health  or  similar  reasons.  When  the  Board 
appealed  to  young  men  and  women  not  to  allow  the  im- 
pression that  the  funds  of  the  Board  would  not  permit 
them  to  be  sent  out  to  be  made  a  rule  of  duty  or  to 
hinder  them  from  offering  themselves  to  the  missionary 
service,  the  General  Assembly  endorsed  this  view,  and 
in  the  Spring  of  1864  declared:  "New  Missions  are 
needed.  Shall  they  be  established?  Is  it  inquired,  Where 
are  the  means?  We  answer.  They  are  in  the  hands  of 
the  Christians,  who  are  God's  stewards.  Let  a  proper 
demand  be  made.  Let  this  Assembly  call  on  the  churches, 
and  that  call  will  be  answered.  The  response  will  come 
to  us  in  the  spirit  of  that  consecration  in  which  all  God's 
people  have  laid  themselves  and  their  all  upon  His  altar. 
In  the  opinion  of  the  General  Assembly,  the  Presbyte- 
rian Church  under  its  care  should,  during  the  ensuing 
year,  increase  the  amount  of  funds  put  under  the  com- 
mand of  the  Board  of  Foreign  Missions,  for  the  spread 
of  the  Gospel  among  the  heathen,  to  not  less  than  three 
hundred  thousand  dollars."  As  the  war  drew  to  a  close 
the  Board  reported  that  never  in  its  history  had  there 
been  times  when  the  financial  prospects  appeared  so 
dark.  The  rates  of  exchange  cut  the  value  of  the  Ameri- 
can bills  in  half.  But  the  light  broke  through  the  dark- 
ness, and  the  Board  reported  in  1865,  *'  It  has  not  been 
necessary  ,to  break  up  any  of  the  Missions,  to  recall  any 
of  the  missionaries  nor  to  keep  at  home  for  pecuniary 
reasons  any  of  the  brethren  who  desired  to  be  sent  forth 
on  this  service." 

The  Christian  conscience  of  the  nation  during  the  days 
of  the  Civil  War  saw  in  the  generous  outpouring  of 
life  at  the  call  of  the  nation  not  a  reason  for  exemption, 


io8     The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

but  a  ground  of  appeal  in  the  matter  of  missionary  service. 
The  Presbyterian  General  Assembly  of  1865  resolved 
"  That  the  work  of  Foreign  Missions  calls  for  expansion. 
The  prayers  and  wants  of  our  brethren  in  the  field,  the 
field  itself  white  to  the  harvest,  the  loss  occasioned  by 
age,  infirmity  and  death  among  the  laborers,  all  appeal 
for  an  increase  of  men  and  means;  while  the  voice  of 
God's  providence,  in  His  favor  to  this  work,  clearly  says 
to  His  Church  '  Go  forward.'  The  promptness,  energy 
and  abundance  with  which  our  young  men  have  come 
forward  during  the  past  year  to  engage  in  our  armies 
for  the  defense  of  our  nation  .  .  .  should  encourage 
Christians  to  pray  for  that  increased  devotion  of  our 
sons  to  the  service  of  Christ,  which  is  demanded  to 
provide  ministers  and  missionaries  to  go  into  the  fields 
which  are  now  open  to  hear  the  Gospel." 

The  Church  to-day  cannot  be  justified  in  sinking  to  a 
lower  measure  of  courage  and  devotion  than  marked  our 
fathers  in  the  days  following  the  Civil  War.  The  nation 
is  vastly  richer  now  than  then,  and  abundantly  able  to 
meet  every  obligation,  first  among  them  its  obligations 
to  God  and  the  Gospel.  There  are  men  enough  and 
to  spare  for  all  the  work  that  needs  to  be  done  —  fore- 
most the  great  constructive  work  of  spreading  Christ's 
message  of  peace  and  good  will  among  the  nations,  and 
planting  everywhere  the  principles  of  the  Gospel.  The 
increase  of  suffering  on  account  of  war  does  not  diminish 
the  chronic  suffering  of  Asia  and  Africa.  The  hungry 
of  these  lands  are  not  less  hungry  because  there  is  want 
in  Europe  as  well.  Preachers  of  the  Gospel,  medical 
missionaries,  teachers  and  friends  of  mankind  who  will 


Ihe  War  Aims  and  Foreign  Missions     109 

serve  the  needy  in  the  spirit  of  Christ  are  more  needed 
throughout  the  non-Christian  world  to-day  than  they 
were  before  the  war.  And  while  all  other  duties  must 
be  done,  these  primary  and  continuing  duties  must  not 
be  left  undone.  The  nation  will  be  stronger  for  its 
task  at  home  if  it  is  faithful  to  its  ministries  of  peace 
to  all  the  world. 

And  now  will  the  men  and  women  who  have  lives  to 
give  act  upon  a  pinched  and  withholding  principle?  Can 
we  believe  that  the  men  who  were  willing  to  give  their 
lives  for  the  nation  and  the  cause  in  the  war  will  not 
be  willing  to  give  them  for  Christ  and  the  world  and 
this  work  now  that  the  war  is  done?  It  is  inconceivable 
that  it  should  be  so.  The  men  who  unselfishly  gave 
themselves  to  the  cause  to  which  God  called  the  nation 
and  who  in  that  cause  counted  everything  loss  —  who 
deemed  life  itself  merely  the  reasonable  offering  which 
it  was  their  duty  and  joy  to  make  —  will  not  now,  surely, 
when  the  war  is  done,  be  content  to  turn  aside  to  selfish 
and  easy  lives.  Surely  they  will  want  to  carry  forward 
in  the  days  of  peace  the  same  ideals  for  which  they  con- 
tended in  the  time  of  war  —  the  ideals  of  human  brother- 
hood, of  international  justice  and  service,  of  peace  and 
good  will. 

And  now  is  the  time  when  men  should  face  this  issue 
of  the  principles  by  which  they  are  going  to  live  in  peace 
times.  Now  is  the  time  when  thousands  of  men  who 
have  learned  the  unworthiness  of  selfish  lives  should 
resolve  to  give  themselves  to  the  Christian  ministr)^  to 
missionary  and  social  service,  and  to  careers  of  philan- 
thropic and  political  and  religious  consecration.     Millions 


no     The  New  Opportunity  of  the  Church 

of  young  Americans  went  on  a  foreign  mission  to  northern 
France.  Thousands  of  these  men  should  go  forth,  now 
that  the  war  Is  over,  on  the  foreign  mission  of  peace  to 
Asia  and  Africa  and  Latin  America.  There  are  men  who 
win  read  this  to  whom  the  missionary  Idea  had  never  oc- 
curred before  and  there  are  others  who  have  thought  of  It 
again  and  again,  but  who  have  evaded  the  missionary  obli- 
gation. They  say  they  never  had  "  a  missionary  call." 
They  do  not  plead  that  excuse  when  the  nation  asks 
them  for  their  lives.  Why  should  they  need  a  different 
kind  or  degree  or  measure  of  call  from  Christ  than  they 
have  had  from  the  nation?  There  are  men  who,  with- 
out a  quiver,  went  across  the  sea  and  took  whatever  came, 
but  who  have  been  avoiding  the  missionary  obligation, 
which  does  not  ask  them  for  any  more.  Why  for  the 
one  and  not  for  the  other?  "  We  thus  judge  " — we  read 
the  words  of  Paul,  **  We  thus  judge  that  One  died  for 
all,  therefore  all  died;  and  He  died  for  all,  that  they 
that  live  should  no  longer  live  unto  themselves,  but  unto 
Him  who  for  their  sakes  died  and  rose  again." 

For  four  years  the  world  has  poured  out  life  and  wealth 
without  limit.  It  was  a  struggle  which  ought  never  to 
have  been.  But  once  precipitated  there  was  but  one 
thing  to  do  and  that  was  for  an  outraged  world  to  go 
through  with  It  at  whatever  cost  and  to  spare  nothing 
until  the  calamity  was  removed  and  the  liberties  of 
the  world  were  secured.  And  now  the  struggle  is  past. 
Shall  the  sacrifices  made  for  war  be  discontinued  or 
shall  we  be  ready  to  do  for  peace  and  for  the  coming 
of  the  Kingdom  of  righteousness  all  that  we  did  for 
war  and  for  the  prevention  of  what  we  believed  to  be 


The  War  Aims  and  Foreign  Missions      1 1 1 

the  threatened  destruction  of  the  freedom  of  mankind? 
Were  not  those  sacrifices  rational  only  as  we  now  com- 
plete and  perfect  them  in  their  perpetual  consecration 
to  the  establishment  of  the  reign  of  Christ  in  human  life  ? 


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Christian  Internationalism 


By  WILLIAM  PIERSON  MERRILL 

Cloth,  12°,  $1.50 

"  An  army  pushing  its  victorious  advance  finds  one  stubborn 
stronghold  which  resists ;  and  it  reaHzes  that  it  must  capture 
that  one  center  of  resistance  or  its  advance  is  imperilled.  So 
Christianity,  advancing  to  the  control  of  the  world's  life,  halts 
before  this  great  citadel  of  International  Relationships  where 
pagan  forces  are  still  strongly  intrenched;  and  it  realizes  that 
the  whole  program  and  hope  of  Christian  Redemption  are  held 
back,  thwarted,  imperilled,  until  that  fortress  is  reduced." 

Christian  Internationalism  lays  siege  to  this  fortress  and 
marshals  in  force  manifold  considerations,  political,  social 
and  religious,  in  support  of  the  case  for  an  immediate  end 
of  the  old  arbitrary  conduct  of  nations  toward  each  other 
and  a  beginning  of  a  new  era  of  peaceful,  ordered  freedom. 

CHAPTER  HEADINGS 

CHAPTER 

I.  The  Function  of  Christianity  in  the  World. 

II.  The  Old  Testament  and  Internationalism. 

III.  The  New  Testament  and  Internationalism. 

IV.  Christianity  and  Internationalism. 
V.  Democracy  and  Internationalism. 

I.  America  and  Internationalism. 

II.  Constructive  Proposals  for  an  International  Order. 

VIII.  Problems  Confronting  Internationalism. 

IX.  Christian  Principles  Underlying  Internationalism. 

X.  The  War  and  Internationalism. 

XI.  The  Church  and  Internationalism. 

XII.  Conclusions. 


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The  Coming  of  the  Lord 

Will  it  be  Premillennial? 

By  JAMES  H.  SNOWDEN,  D.D.,  LL.D. 

Professor  of  Systematic  Theology  in  the  Western  Theological 
Seminary,  Pittsburgh,  Pa. 

Cloth  12°,  $1.75 

The  question  of  the  second  or  final  coming  of  Christ  has  been  an 
important  and  at  times  an  intensely  interesting  and  stirring  one  from 
the  days  of  Christ  and  his  apostles  to  the  present  hour.  The  great  War 
has  again  kindled  it  into  intensity,  and  numerous  "  prophetic  confer- 
encea  "  are  being  held  and  many  books  on  it  are  appearing. 

Dr.  Snowden's  book  is  probably  the  first  comprehensive  and  systematic 
and  scholarly  treatment  of  the  question  which  has  been  produced  since 
Dr.  David  Brown's  well-known  "  Second  Advent  "  appeared  seventy 
years  ago,  a  work  that  has  ever  since  been  an  authority  on  the  post- 
millenanan  side  but  is  now  in  some  respects  out  of  date.  The  present 
work  is  based  on  a  broad  study  of  the  literature  of  the  subject,  the 
list  of  "  Works  Consulted  "  prefixed  to  it  comprising  about  one  hundred 
and  twenty  authors.  The  literature  on  both  sides  of  the  question  has 
been  read  and  the  treatment  of  it  in  this  book  is  characterized  through- 
out by  impartiality,  fairness,  and  a  sincere  desire  and  effort  to  reach 
and  state  the  truth.  All  difficulties  are  frankly  faced,  and  the  discus- 
sion is  pervaded  by  the  spirit  of  brotherly  kindness  and  courtesy.  Pre- 
millenarians  can  read  this  book  without  feeling  that  they  have  been 
misrepresented  and  without  irritation.  Whatever  one's  point  of  view 
on  the  question,  he  will  find  this  work  informing  and  inspiring.  It  is 
not  a  technical  and  dry  book,  but  a  live  and  interesting  one,  and  even 
a  sense  of  humor  is  not  lacking  in  its  pages.  Its  concluding  chapter 
on  "  Is  the  World  Growing  Better?  "  is  a  notable  piece  of  writing  and 
is  probably  the  best  available  statement  and  proof  of  an  optimistic  view 
of  tha  world. 


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The  Course  of  Christian  History 

By  W.  J.  McGLOTHLIN,  Ph.D.,  D.D. 

Professor  of  Church  History  in  the  Southern  Baptist 
Theological  Seminary. 

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This  volume  has  been  written  with  a  full  and  accurate  knowledge  of 
the  subject  gained  from  study  in  European  Universities  and  teaching 
in  one  of  the  leading  theological  institutions  of  this  country. 

While  it  is  thoroughly  scientific  in  spirit  and  is  abreast  of  the  latest 
developments,  the  author  has  at  the  same  time  preserved  that  lucidity 
and  simplicity  of  statement  and  style  which  make  the  book  interesting 
and  readable  for  the  general  student. 

**  The  study  of  the  course  that  has  been  taken  by  the  Church  in  its 
extended  life  is  most  interesting  and  fascinating,  when  guided  by  one 
who  is  able  to  speak  as  a  real  master.  .  .  .  The  growth  and  develop- 
ment of  the  church  from  its  early  days,  on  through  the  middle  centuries 
and  into  modern  times,  is  portrayed  in  a  skillful  and  authoritative  way, 
and  much  light  is  shed  on  the  great  controversies  and  councils,  in  the 
development  of  doctrines,  the  spread  of  heresies  and  the  expansion  of 
the  life  and  work  of  the  church." —  Herald  and  Presbyter. 

"  The"  volume  is  different  from  the  general  run  of  church  histories. 
...  It  is  readable,  interesting  and  informing.  The  book  is  intended 
primarily  for  college  students  and  is  well  adapted  to  this  use.  .  .  .  The 
book  is  also  well  adapted  to  the  use  of  Bible  classes,  mission  study 
classes,  etc..  and  could  be  used  by  them  to  great  profit.  .  .  .  Dr.  Mc- 
Glothlin  has  done  a  splendid  piece  of  work  in  this  volume  and  made 
a  real  contribution  to  the  literature  on  the  history  of  Christianity.  We 
wish  for  this  book  a  wide  reading." — Review  and  Expositor. 


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THE  NEW  OPPORTUNITY  OF  THE  CHURCH 

Preparing  By  ROBERT  E.  SPEER 

This  volume  very  suitably  follows  Dr.  Speer's  The  Chris- 
tian Man,  the  Church,  and  the  War,  dealing  as  it  does  with 
the  present  responsibility  of  the  Church. 
THE  CHURCH  FACING  THE  FUTURE 

By  WILLIAM  ADAMS  BROWN 

Dr.  Brown  discusses  four  big  questions:     First,  Where  the 
War  Found  the  Church;   second,  What  the  Church  did  for 
the  War;   third,   What   the   War   did    for  the   Church;   and 
fourth.  Where  the  War  Leaves  the  Church! 
DEMOCRATIC  CHRISTIANITY;  SOME  PROBLEMS 

OF  THE  CHURCH  IN  THE  DAYS  JUST  AHEAD 

By  FRANCIS  J.  McCONNELL 

"  We  have  in  mind  the  tasks  of  to-day  as  they  confront  the 
Christian  Church,"  writes  Bishop  McConnell. 
GOD'S  RESPONSIBILITY  FOR  THE  WAR 

By  EDWARD  S.  DROWN 

Dr.  Drown  discusses  this  very  interesting  question  in  terse 
and  vigorous  prose. 
THE  TWENTIETH  CENTURY  CRUSADE 

By  LYMAN  ABBOTT 

Written  by  one  who  has  an  exultant  faith  that  never  in  the 
history  of  the  past  has  there  been  so  splendid  a  demonstra- 
tion of  the  extent  and  power  of  the  Christ  spirit  as  to-day. 
THE  WAY  TO  LIFE    By  HENRY  CHURCHILL  KING 

A  discussion  of  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount,  similar  to  that 
in  Dr.  King's  former  book  The  Ethics  of  Jesus.     Besides  re- 
writing  them,   he   has   added   material   on   the   war   and  the 
teachings  of  Jesus. 
THE  CHRISTIAN  MAN,  THE  CHURCH  AND  THE 

WAR  By  ROBERT  E.  SPEER 

Dr.  Speer  here  discusses  the  essentials  of  a  problem  which 
has  exercised  Christian  men  since  the  beginning  of  the  war. 
He  deals  with  it  sanely  and  in  a  manner  that  will  be  consid- 
ered distinctly  helpful. 
NEW  HORIZON  OF  STATE  AND  CHURCH 

By  W.  H.  P.  FAUNCE 

"  Broad,  profound  scholarship,  close  relationship  with  pro- 
gressive sentiment  all  over  the  land,  and  unusual  powers  of 
keen  analysis  and  graphic  statement  are  forceful  elements  in 
The  Ne7v  Horicon  of  ^ti'e  and  Church." — Philadelphia 
North  American.         

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